Robert Dallet and the animal world

Robert Dallet’s animal drawings had a life beyond the scarf. His website preserves the record of Les Félins, an exhibition at the natural history museum in Paris in 1985. That setting offers a useful introduction to his work: the animals can be approached as subjects of study before they become motifs to wear. It also encourages a slower kind of looking, attentive to the creature rather than only to the surrounding pattern.^[2]

The website’s Hermès catalogue dates the first collection appearances of Kenya and Équateur to 1988. It also distinguishes the original Équateur from a later wash-scarf version. These entries bring two histories into focus: the history of a drawing and the history of the different objects that carry it. For anyone meeting Dallet through a recently made scarf, the distinction matters.^[1]

Jungle Love provides another example. The site places the original design in the 2000 collection while listing a later Jungle Love Love version separately. Tendresse Féline is dated to the 2012 collection. Dates like these belong to the publication and adaptation of designs; they should not automatically be read as the dates on which an artist sat down to draw. A catalogue can preserve that distinction without diminishing the pleasure of the image.^[1]

In 2016, the exhibition Fierce and Fragile brought his work to Greenwich. The artist’s archive records the Hermès presentation there from January to March. Panthera’s annual report connects the exhibition with a wider partnership and the Robert Dallet Initiative for Wild Cat Conservation. The drawings thus entered a conversation about the survival of their subjects, as well as their appearance.^[2][3]

A rewarding way to follow Dallet is to move between these contexts: study, textile and exhibition. Each changes the scale of attention. A scarf may draw the eye with an overall pattern; an individual animal can hold it there.