Broadside with 48 scenes depicting animals from Mr Bidel's zoo in Barcelona

Art Historical Context

This vibrant broadside, created around 1870–1880 by Antonio Bosch and Narciso Ramírez, offers a lively glimpse into the popular entertainment of nineteenth-century Barcelona. Printed as a single sheet featuring forty-eight individual scenes, it showcases the exotic animals of Mr. Bidel’s zoo, including lions, tigers, elephants, and birds alongside their human handlers. Such broadsides served as affordable promotional tools, allowing the public to imagine the wonders of traveling menageries and early zoological collections at a time when international trade brought increasing numbers of exotic species to European cities. The artists employed wood engraving, a precise relief printing technique well suited to capturing dynamic animal poses and detailed backgrounds on the distinctive yellow paper. This medium enabled the economical production of lively, multi-scene compositions that could be distributed widely. Today housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Drawings and Prints, the work reflects the era’s growing fascination with natural history and public spectacle, transforming a simple advertisement into an engaging visual record of Barcelona’s cultural life.