Fantastic Animals

Description for blind and low-vision visitors

Three horizontal canvases are stacked one above the other inside a tall wooden box frame. The wood is a warm brown, and the canvases sit back from its front edge, so the inner faces of the box show as a dark band around them. The three touch, with no divider between them, and each is painted on its own ground: yellow at the top, red in the middle, yellow and pale green at the bottom. In the top panel two roosters stand face to face, beak to beak, their legs crossed between them. The one on the left is blue and violet, with a crest of green and red feathers, a red wattle and a large eye ringed in blue and green. Its wing is dark green, worked in fine scales, and a fan of red and white striped feathers spreads below it. Its legs are orange, with black talons. The one on the right is lilac and pink, speckled with white dots, with a dark green wing edged in white and lilac legs that end in red feet. Long tail plumes of blue, red, green and white sweep out to both sides, and fine rays of colour radiate around the two birds against the yellow ground. Green tufts of grass grow at their feet. The middle panel is covered in fine horizontal strokes of red, blue and white. A huge fish curves across it, its tail rising at the left and its head at the right, where a round yellow eye sits above enormous open jaws lined with long white teeth and a lilac tongue. Its back is patterned in green, white and orange, its belly is a pale band dotted in blue, orange and green, and long feathery fins of green, yellow and red trail from it. A small yellow fish swims straight into its mouth, an olive fish passes above, and a small red fish hangs at the lower right. In the bottom panel a large heron-like bird bends its head down at the right, its long black and blue beak reaching for a blue fish that leaps up beneath it. Its eye is ringed in orange and blue. The body is covered in dark green plumage dotted with colour and edged with bands of red and white scallops, and a wing of rust and red stripes lies across its back. Behind it rises a mound of blue scales dotted with white. Orange webbed feet rest on the yellow ground, and a purple fish with an open mouth leaps at the upper left. A yellow outline surrounds the figures, and beyond it the ground is a mottled field of pale green and white.