We tend to associate talking ­animals with children’s ­cartoons, but they have a far longer ancestry than Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny; they go back to Aesop and beyond, and they haven’t always addressed audiences of children. Putting arguments into the mouths of animals is one way of insinuating them into the political ­discourse: the French ­seventeenth-century fabulist Jean de La Fontaine got his cele­brated Fables past Louis XIV’s censors by making ­animals the apparent targets of his satire. 

It was perhaps no accident that, two centuries later, French interest in La Fontaine revived during a period of political upheaval. In 1879, the rich collector Antony Roux commissioned a set of watercolour illustrations of the Fables from a group of contemporary painters. Among them was Gustave Moreau (1826-98), whose dreamlike paintings of biblical and mythological scenes had been causing a sensation at the Salon. Moreau was an unlikely choice as he had no experience of painting animals, but he took himself off conscientiously to study the occupants of the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and featured an elephant named Bangkok and a lion called Brutus in his paintings.