Interesting item here for the scientific community to consider. It’s an original engraving from 1746 by Nathaniel Parr, who passed away in 1751. You can find other line engraving prints by Parr in art museums. Since Parr was working before 1825, we can consider his work to be ‘Old Master’.
The first words in the caption are: “Man Ape”. There are different names for these types of creatures, such as Bigfoot or Sasquatch and Yeti or Abominable Snowman. People aren’t sure if something like Bigfoot would be a North American ape, or what.
Plate size: approx. 6 1/4 x 8 1/8 inches; Sheet size: approx. 8 1/8 x 10 1/4 inches; Matting size: approx. 12 3/8 x 14 1/4 inches. Very good condition considering age, w/ some light staining to the paper and a little waviness. Presents nicely. See pictures for details.
The “Man Ape” is an interesting topic to me, so I wrote up a report on it here (which you don’t have to read unless you want to):
Back in Colonial times, well before westward expansion and American independence, people of the English speaking world were fascinated by the Man Ape. In relation to this engraving, said creature, called a “monster”, was thought by some “to be engendered between an ape and a woman”.
This engraving also relates to the idea of human evolution and Darwin although it’s pre Darwinian. But, the story here is that people in London were thinking that the Man Ape seemed “to be the Satyr of the Ancients”. It’s not a Man Goat (!), but I see what they meant: part man, part animal.
They described the Man Ape as being proportioned like a man but of larger size and very tall. His body was covered with hair, of a “dun colour”. He always goes erect, sleeps in trees, and the species do bury their dead under heaps of boughs and sticks. They thought the Man Ape to be “a middle species between the human and the baboon”.
In this engraving, the Man Ape was supposedly from Angola. Even though they didn’t think the monster ate flesh, they did think it would kill people who were passing through the forests, and in Africa, would attack large animals like elephants, beating them with their fists! Obviously, there were none lurking around London, so this was partly based on true or false stories from the woods of Mayomba (today, Mayombe) in the The Kingdom of Loango.
People in London believed there were two sorts of these monsters, the bigger called Pongo and the lesser called Enjeko (Engeko). It’s hard to read the old text online, but it looks like the were called Oujas Morrow in Africa and each creature was called “a Woodman” / “Forest Person” or Orang Outang by “the Indians” (people from the Indies or today’s Indonesia area). Malay people informed Dutch scientist Bontius that the ‘ape’ could talk, but preferred not to.
Fast forward to present day. It’s hard to explain. The Man Ape from Angola was maybe an Orangutan. If so, it couldn’t have been from Angola. But, it could have been from a place they were calling Angkola which would be Sumatra, I guess. Since the information was wrong, other possibilities are that the Man Ape was from Angola and was actually a different creature such as a gorilla or it was something else, now extinct or otherwise (?). I suppose the Chimp in the engraving is just that, but as you can see, people thought they were also human-like, walking around with a hiking stick.
For art-people, there’s a fascinating detail in this engraving. The Man Ape was apparently presented (alive) to The Prince of Orange by N. Tulpius, M.D. That would be Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. He was appointed praelector (lecturer) of the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, and widely considered one of the most brilliant anatomists, physicians, politicians, and socialites of the era.
Each winter, the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons held a public anatomic dissection open to both paying visitors and the Dutch elite alike. The Guild commissioned artists to immortalize the meetings and the anatomic dissection. The paintings would be displayed in the boardroom of the Guild of Surgeons. Few paintings symbolize the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic better than ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’ by Rembrandt van Rijn.
Tulp’s Observationes Medicae (Medical Observations), printed in 1641, is known as ‘The Book Of Monsters’. There is an image in the monster book of this Man Ape, supposedly an Orangutan. Tulp called it Homo Sylvestris. “Orang Outangs” were, at different times, called Pongo pygmaeus, Simia satyrus, Satyrus indicus, etc.
Much of this has been difficult for scientists to interpret over the years. In 1718, Bontius calls the “Orang Outang” ‘homines montani caudati’ and in 1758 Linn calls it ‘Homo caudatus hirsutas’. See photo posted above of: “Orang Outang, sive Homo silvestrus Bontius, 1718, p. 84, A pilose (pilose means hairy, furry) woman, cited by Linn, 1758a, as basis of Homo troglodytes”. So, what scientists called an Orangutan over the years ranged from the Man Ape we have here to the hairy woman-like creature in the photo.
It’s thought that Buffon’s Orang-outang represented a composite species: Chimpanzee, Orangutan, and a ‘freak’ human being (hairy-woman). After the picture of the Orang Outang, which looks like a hairy woman, I posted another picture of what were also called Orang Outangs. These pictures are from the U.S. Treasury Dep’t publication: ‘The Nomenclature For Man, The Chimpanzee, The Orang-Utan, And The Barbary Ape’.
Scientists say we human beings are very closely related to the chimpanzees and that we had a common ancestor 6-8 million years ago. Gorillas share our DNA a tiny bit less (98% in common with humans), and Orangutans a bit less than that.
I don’t really know what the Man Ape in this engraving was, for sure. But, I think it was misidentified. Whatever it was, it just goes to show people that the idea of Bigfoots or Man Apes has been around for a long, long time. They may be nothing more than just another Great Ape.
We humans are discovering new things all the time. In 2017, a recently discovered (in 1997) species of Orangutans, the Tapanuli Orangutan, was announced. There are only 800 of them and they live in a 475 square mile area of Sumatra. They’ve been around for 10,000+ years. How could we not ‘discover’ them until recently? I bet people in fact did see them before. It’s all fun to think about!