Now the funny part… Donkeys were occasionally artists of their own right.

In the late 19th and early 20th century Paris, there were many short lived groups of artists, writers, poets… who made jokes and pranks about their life style and their aesthetic and philosophical credo. And most French people familiar with art of that period know the hilarious story of Lolo, the donkey who was also a painter. This is a picture of him with his owner.

In 1910, a painting called "Sunset on the Adriatic Sea" by as yet unknown Genoa born artist J.R. Boronali created quite a stir at the Salon des Indépendants. It was an abstract work and it sparked off a heated debate among critics, some being very enthusiastic. Until the day French writer Roland Dorgelès made it known, via the newspaper "Le Matin" that it was but a good joke: there was no Genoa born painter called J.R. Boronali. Himself Dorgelès and two of his painter friends had tied a brush dipped in paint to a donkey’s tail and let him do whatever he wanted. The artist was actually Lolo, the donkey that belonged to the owner of famous Montmartre cabaret the "Lapin agile" and together, long-eared and short-eared had had a good laugh at the expense of the critics who had taken it all so very seriously. As to the name of the two-legged imaginary painter, it was an anagram (that is a new word coined by making a different combination of the letters of another word) of Aliboron which is the name of a donkey in one of La Fontaine’s famous fables.

The painting still exists by the way; in 1910, it was sold for a fairly good sum which Dorgelès gave to an orphanage and is now on display in the town of Milly La Forêt, some 56 km south-east of Paris.