Animal Kin presents the other side of the coin: the implications of evolution for our view of the psychology of other species. Had the human mind as well as the body evolved from those of animals? Do we share emotions such as love, anger and sadness, and even the ‘finer feelings’, with them? This section centres on the illustrations to Darwin’s own Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, and shows how his ideas about the way animals thought and felt were intimately bound up with those of popular painters of dogs and other creatures, such as Sir Edwin Landseer and Briton Riviere. Images of apes and monkeys reveal the dilemma arising from Darwin’s ideas. Sometimes our ape ancestors were depicted in ways that showed their kinship with man (Landseer, Hugo Rheinhold); at other times they were demonised as monsters – the brutal shadows of humankind (Emmanuel Frémiet).

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