HIS MAJESTY’S ANTEATER

In the striking exhibit of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid hangs a portrait of a giant anteater (Myrmecophaga jubata). This splendid painting, 1.05 m high by 2.09 m wide, depicts its monumental subject standing majestically in a mountainous landscape. The anteater’s shaggy black tail billows out behind it and its long tongue protrudes from its tiny mouth, almost touching the ground. The insectivore’s powerful foreclaws are clearly visible on its right foot, and it balances on its knuckles – an accurate representation of the way an anteater walks in the wild. A second anteater, smaller than the first, appears curled into a ball on the right side of the painting, its long snout tucked under its grizzled tail. The portrait of the South American insectivore was commissioned by King Charles III and painted in the studio of the court painter Rafael Mengs. According to the inscription on the stone plinth to the animal’s back, it was ‘taken from life in the Casa de Fieras in 1776’ when the anteater was 30 months old and still not fully grown. The painting thus represents the first living anteater to reach Europe, immortalising an exotic and little-known creature whose closest relatives are sloths and armadillos. It also depicts an animal that, in the late 18th century, would find itself at the centre of a heated scientific debate over the relative merits of New and Old World fauna.