During my month at the German Center for Art History in Paris, I will perform archival research on a revised and expanded article version of the third chapter of my dissertation, concerning the relationship between animal genre painting and zoological illustration in mid- to late-nineteenth century France and Germany. Throughout the proposed article, I examine the manner in which the dramatic narrative tropes of animal genre painting were increasingly incorporated into zoological illustrations. Natural history illustrators of the period, much like their animalier counterparts, often portrayed animals as central protagonists existing at a remove from humanity, all while observing most of their subjects—living and dead––in the circumscribed, citified spaces of the zoological garden and natural history museum. Yet the illustrations incorporated dramatic multi-figure (often multi-species) mise-en-scène, psychologized, emotive framing and elaborate habitat backgrounds that minimized or eliminated any implied human presence. These images thereby provided the illusion of exclusive voyeuristic access to alien life worlds.  However, the conventions of single specimen illustrations and anatomical diagrams, with their profile views and blank backgrounds, continued to coexist alongside more dynamic, diegetic plates, even within the same publication, as indicated by the wildly popular Brehms Thierleben (1864) and Curmer and Dubouchet’s dueling guides to the Jardin des plantes (1841). The illustrations from the Thierleben and the Jardin des plantes volumes will therefore serve as the central case studies.