Artwork story
About The Ark
The artist and artwork
The Ark is a large oil-on-canvas animal painting made in Amsterdam around 1700 by Lodewijk Tieling, an artist whose documented activity is concentrated in the final years of the seventeenth century. Its biblical title gives the crowded gathering of creatures a familiar framework, but the pleasure of the image lies in variety: birds, domestic animals, exotic creatures, and human figures fill a theatrical landscape designed for prolonged looking.
The world around it
Around 1700, Amsterdam remained a major center of maritime commerce, publishing, collecting, and scientific curiosity. Animals and natural specimens reached European viewers through expanding global networks, but those same networks were tied to colonial conquest, extraction, and forced labor. A painted menagerie could therefore combine religious storytelling with the period’s appetite for cataloging a much wider world. The work’s abundance reflects both wonder and the unequal systems through which distant knowledge arrived.
A detail to notice
Although The Ark now hangs in The Met’s American Wing, it was executed in Amsterdam. The museum records that New Yorker Samuel Verplanck may have bought it there in 1761 for his marriage to Judith Crommelin, after which the painting developed a long New York ownership history. Its museum location therefore follows the lives and rooms it entered, not simply the place where it was painted, a useful reminder that collection categories often tell stories of movement.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Oil on canvas and held in The American Wing.
Recorded dimensions include 46 1/4 x 61 1/4 in. (117.5 x 155.6 cm).
Subject terms include Ducks, Men, Women, Unicorns, Peacocks, and Swans. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Gift of James DeLancey Verplanck and John Bayard Rodgers Verplanck, 1939.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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