Vintage Dinosaur Art: Hubrecht at the Lyceum – Part 3

It’s time to bring it home, the big project of discussing the seven massive paintings by Marie Hubrecht on the walls of the Joke Smit College, once the Girl’s Lyceum, in Amsterdam. Having discussed the major dinosaur painting first and the early stages of the Palaeozoic second, it’s time we crawl back up out of the time abyss, towards and into our familiar Mesozoic.

In the middle of the Southern wall, above three different doorways, we have the second-largest painting of the set and possibly my second-favourite. The Tempus Carboniferum has a beautiful symmetry to it, dictated by its own unusual shape as much as the hand of Marie. I love how two separate streams come in from the left and the right, each forming their own little basin between the doorways, while the lush green island in the middle makes the whole thing very pretty. There’s a depth to this one that is actually quite rare to see in Hubrecht’s work. It does slightly bother me how left and right have a different horizon, which does look a bit wonky. Was it a goof or a stylistic choice?

The stream on the left side focuses mostly on plant life, but animals can be found near the waterline. The plants look very elegant. A myriad of tree ferns, horsetails and scale trees rule the world in the Carboniferous, and the genera represented include Lepidodendron, Cordaites and Sigillaria. The animals are somewhat hard to make out. Once more taking Verdwenen Werelden as our guideline, I believe that the dark, crocodile-shaped one in the lower right (beneath the curly pteropsid fern) is Archegosaurus, while the one on its left, on the shore, is Loxomma. Both are non-amniote tetrapods, which back then was considered synonymous with “amphibian”. Quite similar illustrations of these have been made by Joseph Smit, so his work might have been her example here.

The little basin of sea shows us a familiar scene of fish, crinoids and cephalopods. The red coral bed on the left here is especially striking, as is the shark close to the surface. It has been given five gills, the correct number of gills for most sharks. Marie is showing her attention to detail. If you’re familiar with Marie’s marine scenes, this is exactly what you’d expect. There are tetrapods on the shore, but not underwater just yet.

The right stream is more swampy and has more animals compared to the left one. This beautifully lush scene has no equivalent in Verdwenen Werelden, which only dedicates one page to the Carboniferous. Once again, in overall terms I can still say that the paintings here have more depth, light and air than the often extremely dense pictures in Verdwenen Werelden. I absolutely love the colours of the water. The restoration team have done a really good job.

In terms of taxa, the same ferns and scaled trees we’ve been looking at have returned in full force. I love how the large scaled trees bear pinecone-like seeds. I can see, in the composition, some inspiration from work that appears in Camille Flammarion’s Le Monde Avant la Création de l’Homme. We can assume most of the darkened animals are temnospondyls; no amniotes appear in Marie’s Carboniferous. On the right bank, a giant dragonfly-like insect appears, likely Stenodyctia. In the lower right, we can see a yellow-and-black creature that looks basically like a normal. modern salamander.

The water basin on the right side reads more like a freshwater scene to me, compared to the now familiar marine pieces Marie produced so many of. For the first time, we observe tetrapods underwater. Diplocaulus, one of the more famous Carboniferous amphibians, can be made out in the lower left corner, with its boomerang-shaped head. Marie’s version is mostly head; more modern depictions of Diplocaulus show that it had a broad body, too. Other than that, we see a big abundance of long, sinuous newts and salamanders. Two ammonites put in a cameo appearance.

In the lower right, I see two animals that look to me like axolotls, those lovable neotenic salamanders that are popular in the pet trade but critically endangered in the wild. There’s a white one and a black one; in the wild, they are mostly black. Not the first or last time modern animals show up in Marie’s work! No doubt they are stand-ins for some generic larval salamander you might have found in the Carboniferous.

In the upper right corner, just over the corner of the door, we see a vicious looking red-and-black scorpion. Details like that never stop catching my eye.

The four canvases I discussed so far were all completed in 1926. The final two paintings, Permicum and Triassicum, weren’t done until 1928. It doesn’t really show on these digital reproductions, but in the room these last two pieces seem different from the rest. Although there is not much different on the surface, and they are still unmistakably Hubrecht, there’s something not quite there that I can’t quite put my finger on, a kind of flair that’s missing. The animals are crisper and stranger, and there isn’t that overall beauty to the whole composition that the previous paintings have, especially the Carbonium and the Jurassicum/Cretaceum.

Here in the Permian there’s a forest on the left, a desert on the right and a river not quite in the middle, plus another underwater view at the bottom. I’m not quite seeing that pleasing sense of balance and symmetry found in the paintings thus far. I get the feeling Marie was focusing in on the details here and slightly losing track of the bigger picture. Was she feeling rushed? Did the enormity of the project begin to wear her down? Or am I seeing something that is not there? Answers on a postcard. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of cool stuff to find on the level of the creatures themselves.

Let’s focus in on the jungle portion of the canvas. I’m immediately struck by a lack of detail on the foliage, compared to nearly all of Hubrecht’s other works. She usually painstakingly paints the most finely-detailed plants, but here they are almost blotched in vague, broad strokes. The animals are more sharply delineated, and stick out all the more. In contrast to some of her other jungle scenes, we don’t have to work very hard to find them.

The bestiary here now consists mostly of amniotes: reptiles, and our own synapsid kin. Back in Marie’s day, they were all lumped under “reptiles”. Fortunately, this image has a pretty direct equivalent in Verdwenen Werelden, so we can confidently assign taxa to all of them. Dimetrodon is, of course, the most recognizable of the synapsids. It is shown curiously head on, quite large, sitting close to the riverbed. I wonder whose example she is following here. Well known Dimetrodon reconstructions at the time included those made by Knight and Case, but both show the animal in side-view. It’s interesting how splayed its fingers are. At the very top of this cropped image, another Dimetrodon is facing away from us.

Other sail-backed animals can be seen on the left (Araeoscelis) and right (Naosaurus, now synonymous with Edaphosaurus). Araeoscelis is interesting, as it wasn’t a sail-back at all. It’s so basal an amniote that it’s unclear if it’s on the reptile or synapsid line of the family tree. Directly underneath Naosaurus, we find Varanops. Once again, Marie has taken its name literally, by making it look almost exactly like an extant monitor lizard (more accurately, a tegu). Again, this animal could be either a reptile or a synapsid. The rather spiky creature, second from the left on the bottom bank, is apparently Diadectes, which was in reality a smooth-skinned and quite heavyset creature. And so on, and so forth.

And, just as I thought things were getting boring, Marie hits us with another magnificent oddball. It’s a black-and-white, round creature, with a sloping tail and what looks like feathered limbs and a feathered back. And, of course, there is that long orange bird beak. What on Earth are we looking at? So, it’s meant to be Struthiocephalus, which in reality was, indeed, a long-nosed, heavily built synapsid. But the actual animal is less interesting to me than the beaked creature we observe here, and the creative process behind it. Was Hubrecht going off someone’s dodgy example here, or did an expert tell her it was a beaky animal called “ostrich-head” and did she let her fantasy run wild? I’m inclined to believe the latter option. We’re almost in Jheronimus Bosch-territory here.

In similar vein, though less outlandish, is the turtle-like creature to its right. It is Endothiodon, another synapsid, a dicynodont this time, related to the well-know Lystrosaurus and Placerias. I must believe an expert told her its head was vaguely turtle-like, and she ran with it.

Above these two, we observe a trio of good old Moschops, and these look much more familiar to us. I believe she had a good example to work off of here, perhaps the same illustrator responsible for the inspiration for her Dimetrodon, I’ve not been able to find it, though; I couldn’t find any vintage Moschops illustrations earlier than Burian. Have I ever told you how bloody useless Google is anymore, with its image function completely taken over by AI slop? If these three look familiar to anyone, please let me know.

The same, I think, is true for these two snarling Inostrancevia. This animal was a beloved subject for early 20th century palaeoartists and surely an animal for which many good reference illustrations were available. Pareiasaurus below suffers again from Marie’s literalism: it was described to her as toad-like, so she drew a big monster toad.

I’m not doing to spend much time on the Permian sea here, as there’s little here we haven’t seen from Marie’s marine pieces. Marie notes in the book that the trilobites are disappearing at this time, and she represents this by drawing only a handful of them. The first tetrapods have taken to the seas here, represented by Stereosternum and Mesosaurus.

Which brings us to the sole canvas that occupies the West wall, Tempus Triassicum. It suffers again from the same lack of cohesion that the Permian piece does, with once more a desert, a jungle and a sea, whereas the whole doesn’t really become more than the sum of its parts.

At least we’re back in Dinosaur World again, so we’ve got some familiar faces to say hi to. There’s Plateosaurus, the Triassic’s most famous dinosaur. It’s yellow and bipedal, and it’s been given a friendly face and a comical, almost shoe-like snout. There’s Nothosaurus on the shoreline, fishing and looking up to no good. On the right, we observe an even more sinister looking phytosaur, those wonderful crocodile-like goobers that on second glance don’t really look like crododiles at all. The orange, rocky desert reminds me of the Permian and Triassic portions of Zallinger’s Age of Reptiles, but this mural predates that one by two decades! Turtles and dicynodonts complete the desert scene.

The Triassic jungle is another fine mess of curiosities. At last the plants look a little more neatly completed here, compared to the Permian jungle. The scene is filled with dinosaurs… or is it?

The orange-ish bipedal, long-necked creature in the centre looks like it could be another plateosaur. Going by the book, it’s meant to be Sauropus… which Wikipedia helpfully informs me is a species of gooseberry. Some confusion with the clade Sauropoda perhaps? Behind it, chasing each other through the jungle, are two similarly-shaped long-necked, bipedal dinosaurs. The chased animal is Anchisaurus, which is perfectly acceptable, while the chaser is… Cynognathus? That’s basically a mammal. What made her depict it as a dinosaur?

Another phytosaur is lurking by the oasis. Above it, on the left hand side, we see my favourite critter on this portion of the canvas. It’s meant to be Dicynodon, the animal that named the clade. In, what I assume is another flight of fancy, Marie has given it the shield of an armadillo, while it has a beaked face.

If you look in the far right corner, just peeping out from behind a tree, we observe a more threatening looking dinosaur. It’s meant to be Zanclodon. This is a mess of a wastebasket taxon, used for remains from animals as utterly disparate as Plateosaurus and Smilodon. It appears, however, in Flammarion’s Le Monde Avant la Création de l’Homme as a meat-eating Triassic dinosaur, and that is the interpretation Marie has gone with. In reality, true giant theropods remain virtually unknown from the Triassic.

The Triassic oasis is full of delightful critters. The largest one on this portion in the lower right is Mastodonsaurus, a huge temnospondyl amphibian that was famously reconstructed by Waterhouse Hawkins at the Crystal Palace as Labyrinthodon. This reconstruction seems to be based more on Joseph Smit’s more recent work, though. I love how many teeth Marie has given it; that’s her own touch.

For the rest, though, I’m kinda seeing the same more blotchy, unfinished style that bothers me about the Permian canvas. Overall, I do like this composition better.

And then, of course, no Hubrecht canvas is complete without a sea! The fish return in full force, represented by genera such as Perleidus and Langia. More interesting to tetrapod people are the ichthyosaurs. The Triassic was when ichthyosaurs got quite unreasonably large, and the big flat one on the left is the giant Cymbospondylus, which looks subtly terrifying. Meanwhile, the ones feeding on a school of fish on the right are Mixosaurus. I’m fairly certain these were made to a reference, I’d love to know if you know where from.

Comparing the murals to the book Verdwenen Werelden, as I have done throughout this three-part review, my conclusion is inevitably that the murals are, in may ways, the superior work. Both, however, are works of amazing and unparalleled ambition, that few palaeoartists of today would dare take on. Such a parade of extinct animals, featuring multiple representatives of every major family of all extinct animals, would be a daunting task for anyone, let alone one who came to both science and art so late in life. Remember: the book also includes many deep dives into the Cenozoic, which the murals don’t!

I happen to live five minutes away from the Hubrecht Institute, at the Utrecht Science Park. This centre for developmental biology was named after Ambrosius Hubrecht, one of Europe’s leading biologists during the 19th and 20th centuries, and Marie’s brother. Their sister Bramine was a much-celebrated painter of still lifes and portraits, who got decorated all over Europe. Much of her work is now in the Rijksmuseum collection. Both of them died before a career in either science or art was even a glimmer in Marie’s eye.

These paintings, as well as the book, were Marie’s way of securing a legacy of her own, combining science and art in a way that had rarely be done at that time (remember that these works long predate Zallinger’s Age of Reptiles). Come to Amsterdam to see them restored in all their glory, and look out for Dicky van der Zalm’s biography of Marie Hubrecht, set to be released in 2026. No doubt this will be given due attention on the blog!