ART

Life not as we know it
From hyper-real glaciers to chomping plesiosaurs to snarling dogs - the natural world in art was transformed by theories of evolution. Richard Fortey on painters' responses to Darwin
John Collier's 1883 life-size portrait of the great man greets the visitor in the main gallery of the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts. Darwin is dressed in a dark cape. His sober hat is held in his hand as if he were just about to leave on a walk around the grounds of Down House to ponder some new theory. The famous brow beetles with a vengeance. Darwin's brooding presence combines deep seriousness with not a little sadness: he has seen into so much, and yet his wisdom seems to have brought him some regrets. Perhaps he is thinking of his daughter Annie, who died at the age of 10. This is the scientist as icon, a sage for the godless.

Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts
Fitzwilliam Museum,

CambridgeUntil 4 October

After DarwinNatural History Museum, LondonUntil 29 November

As an old man Darwin sat for many portraits, including photographs. We know every hair on his beard. Probably no other major thinker has been so well documented. In this bicentenary year his prolific correspondence is available on the web; his notebooks have been annotated; his books have been reprinted. He has figured on the £10 note. His influence extends just about everywhere, and that includes the visual arts. The Fitzwilliam has brought together an eclectic collection of visual images - scientific, fine art, cartoons, even kitsch - to illustrate Darwin's development, and how his ideas influenced others. The irony is that, unlike many of his contemporaries, Darwin was a lousy artist.
Darwin grew up in a free-thinking liberal-intellectual milieu, one that was full of natural history; after all, his grandfather Erasmus wrote extensively and in occasionally passable verse on the topic. The portrayal of the young Darwin as a kind of Hooray Henry huntin' type is hardly accurate. He was mad about collecting rare beetles from an early age, and some of his guidebooks are on show at the Fitzwilliam. He was also exceptionally lucky with his mentors in Cambridge. Unlike Darwin, John Stevens Henslow could draw with delicate accuracy - his flower paintings are a delight - and he initiated his young charge into the pleasures of geology. What would students today make of hand-painted aids to learning? By comparison, Darwin's attempts at coloured geological sections from the Beagle voyage seem clunky at best.
The artistic ante is raised soon after the encounter with the Collier portrait. This is Darwin after On the Origin of Species, when his ideas had percolated into Victorian society. There are some revelations here. Joseph Wolf drew and painted animals with great accuracy and conviction. No longer picturesque or allegorical, nor mere furry or feathered objects destined to be hunted by humans, these animals could play out their own dramas in "the struggle for existence". The artist casts his cold eye on these products of evolution, and renders them accurately. Ptarmigan are white in winter and mottled grey in summer, not on a whim of the creator, but as a contribution to disguise and to the successful rearing of offspring. Drama does not have to be fed into life painting as a kind of human seasoning: it is the stuff of nature itself. An extraordinary large painting by Abbott Thayer renders a snake concealed to perfection among leaves. Thayer's notions were used for camouflaging tanks in the first world war. Imitation and mimicry are everywhere in the natural world, just as in art. It's a survival technique.
The accurate rendition of nature was also a theme developed by John Ruskin. He revelled in truly representing rock formations, dappled with lichens and softened by time. A superbly rendered geological watercolour reminds us what a skilled craftsman he was. He is hung alongside other Victorians who went in for a kind of ecstatic hyper-reality. John Brett's painting of a glacier is almost frighteningly literal and three-dimensional. The viewer feels he might be able to break off a piece of aquamarine ice and drop it in a drink. A famous and rather wonderful painting of Pegwell Bay by William Dyce shows a sea shore on which every pebble is delineated. The whole is suffused with an eerie pale light, which makes the landscape seem more like a first cousin to one of Dalí's rather than Ruskin's. Over-dressed girls seem to be taking an interest in geology. But in the sky, very tiny, is a comet. This is the portrayal of a particular moment in 1858, when Donati's comet appeared. So not only is every stone an accurate stone, but the time is also precisely located. This is verisimilitude gone mad. Dyce was a high church Anglican, and no friend of Darwinism: the comet was there to remind us of a higher order. Ruskin, too, came to abhor what he saw as the arid precepts of natural selection. So these pictures occupy an ambiguous place in the exhibition: reaction rather than homage.
"Nature red in tooth and claw" is certainly the appropriate phrase to describe reconstructions of prehistoric seascapes. In Jurassic-era Dorset everything seems to be vigorously eating everything else. Ichthyosaurs grab plesiosaurs by the neck. The scene is illustrated by a huge and rather hideous daub by Robert Farren, copied from an original sketch by the first director of the Geological Survey, Henry de la Beche. Apparently the artist demurred at portraying the plesiosaur shitting itself with fear, as it had in the original. These vigorously chomping imaginary scenes have a tradition beginning long before the Origin. The age of "sea monsters" had been the subject of popular excitement since the 1830s. In those days the extinct reptiles could seem comfortably and thrillingly distant, emblems of a blasted former world. After the notion of evolution gained general recognition, the thread of life extended continuously into these strange worlds. Who knows, we might even see our own ancestors somewhere in these bloody scenes. I was much less convinced by the inclusion of a worthy but pedestrian painting of a poor family (entitled On Strike), supposedly representing "Struggle in Victorian society". We know that Darwin took a liberal stance on social issues, but I doubt very much that he had the industrial proletariat in the front of his mind when he wrote of the struggle for existence. The inexorable mathematics of Malthus on population growth was nearer the mark.
In 1872 Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a book that broke new ground and confirmed the continuity between the human and the animal kingdoms. It was a lateral-thinking confirmation of all that he had claimed about common ancestry in his earlier works. We are one with the dingo in baring our teeth in anger; we are one with the chimpanzee when we look down in the mouth. Darwin's emotion book provides an excuse to display a whole series of paintings in this exhibition, many by Sir Edwin Landseer, a favourite of Queen Victoria. His pre-Origin oil Dead Stags shows great males dead after combat, and already a fox and an eagle are slipping into sight to enjoy the fruits of others' misfortune. It is too dark to be sentimental, and technically excellent.
But other Landseer paintings play on the commonality of those "expressions of emotion", though most precede Darwin's 1872 book. Never has so much talent been expended on such mawkish results. Dogs are the actors in genre scenes. Be It Ever So Humble, There's No Place Like Home features a pleading mutt lurking outside a kennel, which is clearly a substitute for some highlander's bothy. The eyes invite the viewer to pat the dog on the head, or else send it packing, depending on your susceptibility to canine charm. If you prefer your dogs re-enacting stories from the classics, there is a large picture, Alexander and Diogenes, with the grumpy wiseacre stuck in his barrel ignoring the famous prince. Then there is a self-portrait from 1865, in which Landseer is flanked by two snooty-looking dogs who have found him wanting in several important respects. Just in case you missed the point the title spells it out: The Connoisseurs.
Any claim that these paintings anticipate Darwin's more scientific approach to expression of emotions in dogs and humans (or apes for that matter) is more than the art really deserves. These dogs are, in truth, human beings dressed up in doggy drag. Darwin himself commented that Landseer's portrayal of aggression in Alexander and Diogenes was entirely inaccurate. The paintings are only a couple of steps away from Louis Wain's manically humanoid cats swaggering around snooker tables and smoking cigars. If the visitor wants to see accurate portrayals of dogs snarling or grovelling, then the drawings by Wolf in the same room are much nearer the mark. Totally unsentimentalised, these dogs show the Big Bad Wolf lurking within, and point up both the similarities and the differences between canines and ourselves and our near relatives. In the end Darwin approved Briton Rivière as the illustrator for his expression book, but from the examples shown here Rivière was not entirely free of a tendency to over-egg the human qualities of his animal subjects. The reaction of contemporary artists to Darwin's observations on animal expressions is currently being explored at an exhibition at the Natural History Museum. It seems that the question of what faces are really telling us still resonates long after Landseer's animals have been confined to Valentine cards.
Some of the paintings on show at the Fitzwilliam are frankly weird. GF Watts is represented by a painting entitled simply Evolution. The whole thing is enveloped in a kind of brownish fog. A strange earth-mother figure looks away from what we must assume are her offspring, a crowd of diminutive and almost faceless creatures that resemble some of the more disturbing aliens from recent episodes of Doctor Who. Odder still are a series of lithographs, Les Origines, by the symbolist French artist Odilon Redon. As they almost used to say on Star Trek, it's evolution, but not as we know it. A nasty furry humanoid with a huge eye in its forehead has "evolved" in one of Redon's visions. This is evolution without its underlying constraint, which a zoologist recognises in the principle of homology. This militates against the evolution of a cyclopean eye in a vertebrate, just as it would mean that angels cannot have both wings and arms. Redon's version of evolution results in creatures as fantastical as any medieval bestiary with its one-legged sciapods and flying quadripedal hippogryphs. The lithographs are a fascinating set, and show that some artists have taken from Darwin just what they wanted.
This brings us back to the image of the sage of Down. There is an interesting comparison to be made between those portrayals of the bearded biologist and old-master paintings of aged saints, such as Caravaggio's St Jerome. You could almost cut out Darwin's head, Photoshop it into the appropriate painting and it might fool you for a second. There seems to be a need for such images celebrating the wisdom of distinguished old age. Darwin has become almost like a saint for the sceptic; his notebooks have become secular relics. An excellent exhibition on Darwin the geologist, around the corner at the Sedgwick Museum, exhibits the rocks that he collected as he travelled the world in the Beagle. Visitors trot around Down House to inspect the "worm stone" (Darwin used it in a long-term experiment on earthworms) with the reverence reserved elsewhere for bits of the true cross. The Fitzwilliam exhibition gives us much to enjoy - there's a sumptuous catalogue by Diana Donald and Jane Munro - and tells us much about how Darwin's ideas soaked into our visual consciousness; and I have not even mentioned the plant drawings.

• Endless Forms is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge until 4 October. After Darwin is at the Natural History Museum, London until 29 November.