August Le Gras

August Le Gras made his living drawing animals, and he learned them from life. As a young man in the 1880s he was a fixture at Artis, the Amsterdam zoo, where he spent years sketching camels, elephants, monkeys and horses in front of their enclosures. He had trained at the Amsterdam academy under August Allebe, the teacher of that whole generation of Dutch painters.

Later he travelled to Algeria and elsewhere in North Africa to study the same kinds of animals in the open and to paint the desert light. In 1905 he settled in Laren, an artists' village east of Amsterdam, where he stayed until his death in 1915. Among collectors he is remembered just as fondly for his small, affectionate pictures of dogs.