Rudolph Zallinger

A former member of the New Britain Museum's Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Committee, Zallinger was the son of the Austrian painter, Franz Xavier, who served as a soldier in World War I. His father was captured by the Russians and interned in Siberia where he met and married the daughter of a Polish engineer working on the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 1924, Zallinger and his family moved to Seattle, Washington, where Rudolph received his first painting instruction from his father. He studied at the Cornish Art School, Seattle, and received his M.A. from Yale University in 1941. Zallinger taught art at Yale from 1942-50 and was artist-in-residence at the University's Peabody Museum of Natural History from 1952-70. He is most renowned for his two magnificent murals in the Peabody Museum, "The Age of Reptiles" (1952) and "The Age of Mammals" (1967). "Life" commissioned Zallinger to paint illustrations for a series of articles called "The Epic of Man," which surveyed the history of world civilization from the Prehistoric and Neolithic periods through the twentieth century. "The Epic of Man" was published in 1961 by "Life" as a book with the same title.