Giovanni Mario Verdizzotti was a priest and a scholar as well as a painter, designer and engraver. He made this engraving of a lion and a ball for a book called One Hundred Moral Fables. It was published over 500 years ago in Italy.

JF Lewis RA sketched this lion at Polito’s Menagerie, a zoo that existed 200 years ago in central London. People would go there to see porcupines, ostriches, boa constrictors, lions, tigers, elephants and rhinos.

Henry Justice Ford was an illustrator. This howling lion was on the cover of The Animal Story Book that he illustrated in 1896.

Sir Edwin Landseer had a passion for drawing animals. He liked to draw the animals he saw around him, at farms or just in the countryside. The RA’s Collection of his drawings includes a menagerie of animals including cattle, pigs and horses as well as cats and dogs.

Cecil Aldin was an English cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his illustrations of animals. This drawing is taken from his book Field Babies, published around 1919.

Here’s another illustration by William Heath Robinson. This image is a letterpress page from a book in the RA Collection, Peter Quip in search of a friend.

Abraham Cooper RA liked to paint horses and other animals. He began painting animals when he was 22.

This image is a letterpress page from a book in the RA Collection, The Child’s Arabian Nights by William Heath Robinson. Robinson was an English cartoonist and illustrator who studied in the RA Schools in the late 19th century.

Benjamin West was the President of the Royal Academy between 1792-1805. In this painting, he has painted a woman as mother Earth who gazes up as she leans on a big lion. She holds a horn, or cornucopia, full of peaches, grapes and carrots that are being nibbled on by two cheeky rabbits.

Mary Moser was one of the two women who were founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts. She was a flower painter and in the 1790s was asked by Queen Charlotte to design decorations for one of her palaces.