Bamboo, a western lowland gorilla, was the first of his species to live in the Philadelphia Zoo. Born in the dense rainforests of the Congo basin in 1926 and brought to Philadelphia when he was a year old, the playful and sweet gorilla was a favorite personality at the zoo until his death in 1961. Fourteen years later, working from photographs and memory, Palmore memorialized Bamboo in this larger-than-life portrait.
A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Palmore has created portraits of animals for more than four decades. He often frames his subjects within witty or allegorical settings—whether ironic, such as a cat before bird-patterned wallpaper, or resonant, as with Egyptian bee-eater birds against hieroglyphics. Each painting conveys the artist’s reverence for his subjects, achieved through astonishing fidelity to detail: the shimmer of feathers, the texture of fur, or the gleam of a wet nose. “My paintings are about other earthlings that we share this planet with,” Palmore has remarked. His work is in the collections of Woodmere, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.
