28/3/21.Fierce Friends. Artists And Animals, 1750-1900 examines a critical period in our evolving relationship with animals. Between the mid-eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment, the mechanical inventions of the Industrial Revolution, and the intellectual transformation sparked by Charles Darwin undermined many of the traditional roles assigned to animals, and overturned our view of them as physically, mentally - and divinely - separated from humans.