Over the past month, a Thai baby pygmy hippo named Moo Deng has captured the hearts of millions. For many of us, images of the plump creature have filled our screens with hours of delight as her squishy figure distracts us from the horrors in the news. Is her meteoric rise due to her adorably rosy cheeks? Or is it because she’s a sort of Grumpy Cat, with her screams and leg-chomping (which have veered into slightly concerning meme territory) the perfect fit for the chaos of 2024? Perhaps it’s instead the fact that she is a highly dangerous mammal in a bite-sized — some would even say delicious — form.
If we look to art history, we find that Moo Deng is far from the first hippo to enchant audiences near and far, both in and outside of captivity. Just as depictions of Moo Deng range from sweet to spooky, artists have likewise taken a range of approaches when illustrating a species that’s cute to behold from afar, but not so much up close. Let’s revisit a few of this potato-shaped sensation’s ancestors, who waddled so she could zoom.
Hippopotamus (“William”) (c. 1961–1878 BCE), Ancient Egypt, Middle Kingdom
When looking at Ancient Egypt’s storied, often sweet-natured hippo statuettes, you might not know that the animals were widely feared. Today, hippos account for hundreds of fatalities across Africa every year. But in Ancient Egypt, they posed more threats than their enormous bites alone: They could also upend boats on the Nile and, as hungry herbivores, demolish hard-won fields of grain.
During the New Kingdom epoch (c. 1550–1070 BCE), hippos were associated with the fearsome and sometimes evil god Seth. But in the time of the Middle Kingdom some two hundred years earlier, characteristics such as hippos’ habit of diving beneath the water for minutes at a time and emerging gloriously again earned them a different meaning: new life. This is the era of “William,” the bright blue ceramic statue that acts as the unofficial mascot of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Decorated with lotus plants, which also symbolize rebirth, William measures just under five inches tall (~11.3 centimeters). His legs, now restored, may have been originally broken off to prevent him from attacking the person with whom he was buried. Perhaps artists rendered hippos like William as endearing for a similar purpose: to disarm their own fear.
Figurine of the Pregnant Hippo Goddess Taweret, Egypt, Late Period–Ptolemaic Period (664–30 BCE)
Just as Moo Deng and her mother Jona warm our hearts with their nuzzles, Ancient Egyptians, too, noticed that hippo moms have close and loving relationships with their babies. This Late-Kingdom figurine shows Taweret, the goddess protecting mothers and their children, as a pregnant woman with the body of a hippo in statues and carvings. While the goddess took on this form centuries earlier (which is actually a chimera of hippo, lion, and crocodile), she only became widely venerated in the later Ancient Egyptian eras, where, eventually, almost every household kept some figure of her to protect their young.
Jacob Van Maerlant’s “Iphotamus” in Der Naturen Bloeme (c. 1340–1350 CE)
Oh, Medieval European artists! We never tire of your fantastical interpretations of animals you only heard of through a globe-trotting game of telephone. To be fair, what would you do if you were the illuminator for Dutch poet Jacob van Maerlant’s Der Naturen Bloeme (c. 1350), tasked with drawing a “water horse” that also looks like a “dolphin”? While this is the only illustration actually labeled “iphotamus” — an iteration of “hippopotamus” derived from the Greek words for “water” and “horse” — it’s just one of many times the artist attempted to depict a large amphibious creature in Maerlant’s massive manuscript. Do not doubt the Medieval artisan, however: Shirin Fozi, associate curator in the Department of Medieval Art and The Met Cloisters, told Hyperallergic last year that these artists often knew very well that they were drawing something ridiculous — a self-awareness reflected in many Moo Deng memes today.
Adriaen Coenen, Visboek (1579)
By the 1570s, European artists started to get it right. Dutch fishmonger Adriaen Coenen made his living in the ocean, working as a fisherman and salvage master. His 410-page Visboek, meaning “fish book,” was completed in 1579 after three years of research. Some of the illustrations depict creatures he would have seen in real life, while others are faithful imitations of engravings produced elsewhere, all accompanied by ornate borders and detailed text. This may have been a passion project of his, an attempt to share his love of the world’s waters and its creatures so that, as he wrote, “whoever reads or studies it / May spread the word to / Another that he may see and hear.” Among these watercolor and ink artworks of whales, flounders, and fantastical creatures is a blue hippo taking a bite out of a long-tailed reptile — perhaps a foreshadowing of Moo Deng’s coming, down to her wide-eyed glare as she lightly chomps down on her zookeeper friends’ limbs.
Kalabari Otobo Masks
The Kalabari people, who have traditionally lived in the delta of the Niger River, continue the ancient craft of carving otobo masks, named for the hippopotamus, which they also poetically refer to as “the beast who holds up the flowing tide.” Unlike other depictions throughout history, the dancers who wear these masks make no bones about an angry hippo’s ferocity. Dancers wearing the otobo mask emulate a dangerous water spirit through aggressive movements — audience members would do well to avoid provoking them.
Peter Paul Rubens, “The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt” (1616)
Flemish Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens’s 1616 depiction of a hunt for crocodiles and hippopotamuses near the Nile shows a veritable cyclone of destruction, combining his era’s interests in natural history with violent hunting scenes, classical themes, and Orientalist painting. It’s hard to imagine that sweet little Moo Deng is related to the fearsome beast at the center of the action — although, even here, the hippo’s side-eye could hint that it would much rather be lazing in a river than fighting for its life.
The violence in this painting was echoed in its looting during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s, a fate met by several other hunting paintings. Of the group, only this work was returned to its original home in Munich, where it is now held by the Alte Pinakothek.
Michal Piotr Boym, Flora Sinensis
This bizarre representation of two hippos comes from Michal Piotr Boym, a Polish Jesuit missionary who traveled in Mozambique in the 1640s. Perhaps the deformed nature of his strangely charming hippos is due to the fact that he drew them from memory after he settled in China. It’s difficult to determine why the African creature made it into Flora Sinensis (1656), Boym’s tome on Chinese plants and wildlife. But it’s just one of his many drawings that, while not entirely faithful to life, are nonetheless beguiling. I’d like to think that he would’ve delighted in drawing Moo Deng’s belly rolls.
Obaysch and “The Hippopotamus Polka” (1850s)
Over a century and a half before Moo Deng burst onto the scene, Obaysch was the hippo name on everyone’s lips. In the 1850s, he made history as the first hippo seen in Europe since Ancient Roman times. Captured on the Nile and sustained at the London Zoo with gallons of cow’s milk, Obaysch was soon visited by Queen Victoria of England and drew thousands of fans daily. He even inspired composer Louis St. Mars to write “The Hippopotamus Polka,” which was published alongside an amusing sheet music illustration by lithographer John H. Sherwin.
Guy Fawkes in the Strand Magazine
After two failed attempts at producing viable offspring, Obaysch and his beloved Adhela (a female hippo later introduced to his enclosure) finally had a daughter in 1872 named for 17th-century English conspirator Guy Fawkes. She was visited by writer Arthur Morrison and illustrator J.A. Shepard for the 34th edition of the Strand Magazine in 1894, when, at 22 years old, she had ballooned to massive proportions.
Morrison writes that Shepard seemed unsatisfied with Guy Fawkes’s desire to nap. “It is not easy to catch the hippopotamus at a moment of extravagant agility,” he wrote, describing the process of sketching her as “a task of long waiting, weary sitting, tiresome standing, much hanging about, hoping deferred, heart sickness, and final disappointment.”
Eventually, however, Morrison waxed poetic about the hippo, writing, “Let her but lie on it and she would extinguish a volcano and drive an earthquake discomfited away to some part where the earth’s crust was less immovably suppressed.”
Herman Jr. Poses for Frederik Willem Zürcher
In 1865, Dutch artist Frederik Willem Zürcher drew a series of precious sketches of a baby hippo named Herman Jr. According to the City Archives Amsterdam, Herman was the world’s first hippo to survive a birth in captivity. Born to Herman Sr. and Marguetta, also called “Betsy,” he appears to have charmed his portraitist much as Moo Deng has for millions today. Zürcher drew Herman submerged in his little pool, lounging in the sun, and resting his smiling head on a pillow — but was it really there, or did the artist dream of decorating the hippo’s enclosure to keep him cozy? (If the pillow was indeed just fanciful thinking, I would certainly understand; I daydream about all the tutus I’d like to tie around Moo Deng’s chubby tummy.)
