Painted
in the dark.
The world’s first galleries · Tijo Gaucher · 2026
Fifty thousand years ago, someone crawled into the dark with a burning lamp and painted a pig on a limestone wall. This book is the tour: Chauvet’s lions and Lascaux’s bulls, the Sulawesi narrative panels, the Rainbow Serpent, the San trance dancers, the canyon ghosts of Utah.
A survey of humanity’s earliest painted sites across five continents, with the science that dates them, the theories that try to explain them, and the honest fights over both. 136 photographs, a master timeline, a bibliography, and a regional index of every site.
The world’s first galleries were also the world’s first totems. Rooms where the fear was given a body, and the dark was given company.
Paperback ISBN 9798172039232 · Hardcover ISBN 9798172708251 · 87 pages · 8.5 × 11 in paperback, 8.25 × 11 in hardcover, full colour.
Why a painter made it: tijo.art/about