The top 10 animal portraits in art

Carel Fabritius – The Goldfinch (1654)

In this subtle and lifelike painting, Fabritius concentrates on a pet bird with a fascination at once emotional and scientific. He paints the bird's feathers in free, almost impressionistic brush strokes. Yet there's something sad about it, something forlorn. Fabritius himself was to die young. His painted bird is lonely and vulnerable in its tamed beauty.

Albrecht Durer – The Rhinoceros (1515)

Famously, Durer had never seen a rhino. Yet his drawing and woodcut manifest the curiosity about nature that was growing in the Renaissance. Durer imagines the creature – carefully but not quite accurately – as a thing of wonder, a marvel of the natural world. Even today, when we have plenty of accurate images of rhinos to look at, his depiction conveys the spirit of science and the magnificence of the animal world.

Damien Hirst – Away from the Flock (1994)

In his most sentimental work, Hirst freezes in time a young sheep running in the fields. Except it is no longer in the fields, it is in an art gallery, preserved in formaldehyde. Hirst's animal vitrines are portraits of a singularly direct kind. Animals themselves, dead, are uncannily preserved in living postures. This work echoes natural curiosities found in old scientific collections. Yet it has a tragic emotional implication, the image of a life stopped short.

Ancient Egyptian, Late Period – Bronze Cat (After 600BC)

This astonishing bronze portrait of a cat is actually a representation of the cat goddess Bastet. Yet it is also a perfectly observed study of a living cat. It sits as cats sit; it has a feline enigma and grace. Ancient Egyptians found these qualities divine. This is one of the most reverent images of an animal ever created.

Hans Holbein the Younger – A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (c 1626-8)

The animals here are painted with the same precision as the woman whose pets they are. The squirrel is especially vivid. It has a jet-black eye that stares mysteriously back at the painter. Its dark, alien quality contrasts with the woman's homely beauty. Here, Holbein meditates on similarities and differences between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Diego Velázquez – Head of a Stag (1634)

Velázquez portrayed human beings with a cool detached irony. He applies the same clear vision to this portrait of a stag. He neither sentimentalises nor objectifies this creature. Instead, he makes a true "portrait" of it. The animal looks back, aware of the artist. In this moment of reciprocal viewing, we glimpse a consciousness. Just as in a great portrait of a human, Velázquez allows the stag its inner self. For a moment, we see life through its eyes.

Edwin Landseer – The Monarch of the Glen (1851)

In this hyperbolic Victorian painting, the stag is ruler of its highland landscape, a proud surveyor of its wild world. Supercharged with late romanticism, this is an expression of the love for nature that runs through Victorian culture from the writings of Charles Darwin to the decorations of the Natural History Museum. Sure it looks corny, but Landseer's reverence for animals mirrors 21st-century attitudes.

George Stubbs – Whistlejacket (c 1762)

This magnificent animal seems free of everything, even space and time, as it rears up in an abstract unfinished setting. By portraying a riderless horse in the pose of some classical equine statue, Stubbs concentrates our attention on its awe-inspiring singularity. This is a noble portrait. Whistlejacket was a racehorse, Stubbs an artist so dedicated to horses he studied their anatomy, and this is a work that escapes into the secret life of nature.

Pech-Merle Cave – Mammoth (Ice Age)

The ice-age artist who painted this woolly mammoth captured its essence in a work of tremendous expressive power. The mammoth is not pedantically portrayed. Instead, its wild, inhuman character seems to have been captured in a shamanistic act of imagination. Monstrous and marvellous, like Durer's rhinoceros, it is a testimony to the awe early human beings felt for the animals they hunted.

Henri Rousseau – Surprised! (1891)

Rousseau's tiger is a beast of the mind, just as his jungle is a fantastic imaginary landscape. He visualises the tiger as the mighty monarch of its world, like a more surreal and ecstatic answer to Landseer's Monarch of the Glen. It is a fiery embodiment of every savage instinct and energy. Will this painting one day be looked at by human beings who have never seen a real tiger?