Rudolph F. Zallinger

Rudolph Franz Zallinger (November 12, 1919 – August 1, 1995) was an American-based Austrian-Russian artist notable for his mural The Age of Reptiles (1947) at Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History. His painting of the Tyrannosaurus rex heavily influenced the design of Toho Studios' "Godzilla" when the film was made in 1954 (two of Zallinger's dinosaurs — the T. rex and the Apatosaurus (formerly Brontosaurus) are seen as part of the slide demonstration during Dr. Yamane's lecture in the Diet. A third slide showing Zallinger's Stegosaurus was planned but eventually not used in the film).

Other prominent works of Zallinger include:

• Age of Mammals (mural) — a 60 by 5 feet (18.3 by 1.5 m) fresco-secco mural, painted from 1961 to 1967, now displayed on the south wall of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.^[1]
• March of Progress (1965) — a popular illustration and one of the world's most recognizable scientific images.

Biography

Zallinger was born in Irkutsk, Siberia in 1919. He attended Yale's School of Fine Arts on scholarships during the Great Depression, was trained as an illustrator, and he taught at Yale after graduation. The Peabody Museum hired him to paint the mural in 1943 at $40 a week, and Zallinger took a crash course in paleontology to prepare for the job. The mural is one of the largest in the world, measuring 110 feet (33.5 meters) by 16 feet (4.9 meters). It required more than 4.5 years (1943–1947) to complete.^[2] A portion of the mural appeared on a United States postage stamp in 1970.^[3] After that, the museum appointed him as the “artist in residence”, a position he held until his death.^[4]

Zallinger received many assignments, prominent among which are those he did for illustrating articles for Life magazines. His paintings portrayed dinosaurs, the Russian Revolution, the rain forests of Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) and the Minoans of ancient Crete, besides others.^[2]

He taught at the Yale School of Fine Arts, the Hartford Art School at University of Hartford in West Hartford, and at the Paier School of Art in Hamden.^[2]

The Age of Reptiles (1947), a mural painting by Rudolph Zallinger

References

1. "The Age of Mammals mural". Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
2. "Rudolph Franz Zallinger". Yale Peabody Museum: Collections : Archives. Retrieved 25 March 2012.
3. "1970 U.S. Postage Stamp Issues". 1847usa.com. 2011. Retrieved 25 March 2012.
4. Wallace, D.R. (2004). Beasts of Eden. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23731-5.