A photo taken in February at the Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Japan, of Punch, a baby Japanese macaque, gazing affectionately into the oversized eyes of a stuffed orangutan sitting beside him, was among the more affecting images captured so far this year. The intensity of Punch’s soulful, unrequited stare recalls a series of extraordinary paintings undertaken in the last decades of the 19th Century by German painter and primatologist Gabriel von Max, whose poignant portrait Monkey Before Skeleton, 1900, is invigorated by that same unfulfilled longing for a spark.
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