Java Man Family, 1912

Alice Woodward (1862-1951) was well-known as an illustrator of children’s books, having provided the images for editions of Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Black Beauty.  But she also dabbled in dinosaur illustrations, no doubt because her father was the Keeper of Geology at the British Museum (Natural History).  So perhaps that is why she was tapped by Henry Knipe to illustrate his sweeping evolutionary history of the world.  Woodward was pretty good at trilobites and iguanodons, but prehistoric peoples seem to have been a little out of her range.  This plate depicting  Pithecanthropus (Java man) seems more derived from a Sunday at the London Zoo monkey house than it does from any study of the anthropological evidence.