Zdeněk Burian

Czech painter, book illustrator and palaeoartist

Zdeněk Michael František Burian (11 February 1905 – 1 July 1981) was a Czech painter, book illustrator and palaeoartist. Burian's artwork played a central role in the development of palaeontological reconstruction and he is regarded as one of the most influential palaeoartists of all time. Burian began his career as an illustrator in the 1920s and became famous in his native Czechoslovakia for his illustrations of novels, mainly adventure novels and classic works. His illustrations of the novel The Mammoth Hunters (1937) by Eduard Štorch gained the attention of the Czech palaeontologist Josef Augusta, who collaborated with Burian as a scientific advisor. Their collaboration resulted in Burian's work being used in a number of books on prehistoric life written by Augusta, culminating in a series of six great illustrated volumes published in 1956–1966, the most famous of which was Prehistoric Animals (1956). After Augusta's death in 1968, Burian worked with numerous other scientists. He continued to produce artwork for further books, as well as for magazines and museums. It is not known precisely how many paintings Burian produced, with estimates ranging between 1000 and 20,000. Between 500 and 800 of his paintings were prehistoric reconstructions. In total, his illustrations were published in over 500 books, out of which approximately two dozen were on prehistory. Many of his paintings have reached an iconic status; they were extensively copied by later artists and influenced conceptions of dinosaurs and how they were depicted in popular culture.

Zdeněk Michael František Burian was born on 11 February 1905 in the town of Kopřivnice, then part of Moravia in Austria Hungary. In his youth, Burian's talent for art was noticed by his art teacher A. P. Bartoň, who encouraged him to pursue further artistic education. In 1919, Burian graduated from a municipal school and began an education in art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In the interwar period (i. e. 1918–1939), Burian became famous in Czechoslovakia as an illustrator of adventure novels and classic works. He collaborated with numerous publishers and illustrated Czech releases of the works of authors such as Jules Verne, Karl May, Burian is most well known both in the Czech Republic and internationally for his oil paintings. In addition to these, he also produced many gouache paintings and line drawings. The American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould assessed Prehistoric Animals as one of the three most influential books on prehistory published in the twentieth century. Among the artwork produced by Burian in the early 1970s is a painting of Velociraptor as an active and fast moving creature, produced at a time when Robert Bakker's arguments for such depictions were still relatively unknown. Although Burian's early paintings of sauropod dinosaurs tended to depict them as sluggish animals, in line with conceptions at the time, his later (after c. 1970) sauropods show them as active and fully terrestrial animals. In the vast majority of cases, he only had a single photograph to serve as the basis of a painting. Burian's palaeoart is noteworthy for its uses of plants and environments. Many palaeoartists before (including Knight) and after Burian were highly "zoocentric", paying little attention to plants and relegating them either to simplistic renditions in the background or omitting them entirely. Compared with Knight's nearly universal use of plants such as palm trees and grass in the background, Burian's selection of plant life almost always appears plausible. His renditions of plants, although often also confined to the background, were always detailed and naturalistic. Several of Burian's paintings also include plant life as prominently as animals and some of his scenes are entirely devoid of animal life. Particular palaeoartistic paintings by Burian that reached an iconic status and became widespread in the second half of the twentieth century include his Tyrannosaurus with Trachodon (1938), Brachiosaurus (1941), Iguanodon (1950), Brontosaurus (1950), and Tarbosaurus (1970). It is possible that Burian's dinosaurs were among the inspirations for the original design of Godzilla. One of the streets in Burian's home town of Kopřivnice is named after him.