Rudolph Franz Zallinger (German pronunciation: [ˈru:dɔlf ˈtsa:lɪŋɐ];[2] November 12, 1919 – August 1, 1995) was an American-based Austrian-Russian artist.
His most notable works include his mural The Age of Reptiles (1947) at Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the March of Progress (1965) with numerous parodies and versions.
Born in Russia, he was raised in Seattle and became a prominent member of Yale University after painting his murals, gaining him awards and honors.
It was painted from 1943 to 1947, with the help of a six-month crash course in animal and plant life of the distant past and comparative anatomy with Yale's professors.
Such professors include Carl Owen Dunbar (the Director of the Peabody Museum at Yale University, 1942–1959), Richard Swann Lull, G. Edward Lewis, and George Wieland.
[7] It features a timeline of 350 million years of animal and plant evolution, showing the rise and fall of dinosaurs as the rulers of Earth.
[7] However, the wall looked too empty for oceanographer and director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History (1938–1942), Albert Eide Parr.
In 1941, Parr decided to put the task to Zallinger, a student at Yale University at the time who had been painting marine algae for him.
[7] Along with this, his wife is quoted as saying:"We were in the art school, and he'd done some drawings of seaweed for Albert Parr, head of the Peabody Museum of Natural History.
In 1961, Zallinger began work on the 60 by 5.5 feet (18.3 by 1.7 meters) mural[14][15] on the south wall of the Hall of Mammalian Evolution in Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History.
[9] Its chronology moves from right to left, and it depicts a variety of plants, animals and landscapes of western North America in the span of 65 million years.
It wasn't popular until New Haven's former mayor Richard C. Lee, at that time head of the Yale News Bureau, brought it to the attention of the editors of Life magazine.
His paintings portrayed reptiles and dinosaurs, he painted eight pages of the tropical rain forests of Dutch Guiana, drew animals and birds with his wife Jean Day Zallinger, recreated scenes of the Minoans in ancient Crete, contributed to illustrations in the series "The World We Live In", "Wonders of Life on Earth", two of the 12 chapters in "The Epic of Man", illustrated a series on the Russian Revolution, and many others.
[5] He received the Addison Emery Verrill Medal for "outstanding contributions to the field of natural history," which was presented to him by A. Bartlett Giamatti (then president of Yale University) at a ceremony in the Great Hall on February 29, 1980.
Guided by your own diligent research and painstaking collaboration with scientists, your imagination has allowed us a glimpse into past worlds no human eye ever witnessed.
It was your innovation to blend the static frames of successive geologic ages into grand panoramas that sweep through time, capturing the dynamic force of life as it evolved.
"[9][21]At 69 years old (1988), Zallinger received the James E. and Frances W. Bent Award, which is given annually to a faculty member of the University of Hartford for "unusual creativity and innovation in the pursuit of his or her scholarship".