Born in Cologne on 6 August 1882, Josef Pallenberg was extremely interested in animals from an early age. A visit to the Cologne zoo inspired the six-year-old child to begin drawing animals, and attempts to model them followed soon after. Experiments at reconstructing the skeletons of dead animals, which he first boiled in his mother’s saucepans, were the starting point of a later studio that would become crammed with skeletons and casts from nature.

In 1899, Pallenberg, then just seventeen, enrolled at the art academy in Düsseldorf, where he first studied drawing, but soon switched to the sculpture class of Karl Janssen. While he was still a student, his group ‘Boar hunt’ brought him his first critical acclaim in 1902, when ...