The Darwin Effect
Evolution and 19th Century Visual Culture

The results of my concentrated period of research have tended to be aleatory if not downright serendipitous, rather like evolution itself: one thing led to another—or didn't. I have divided up my thoughts on the subject, like Gaul, into three, rather unequal, parts: 1) the "Darwin effect" on some nineteenth-century art and artists; 2) evolution and the representation of a single species—the horse; and 3) evolution and gender theory—or, less anachronistically—the "woman question."
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  thanks to wood s lot

One of the articles from the above link...

Evolution and Degeneration in the Early Work of Odilon Redon

Despite a certain nationalist resistance to Darwin and an early post-war preference for Lamarck, by the mid-1880s Darwinism had emerged as the major philosophical underpinning of the natural sciences, and the theory's conception of man's place in the natural world had reverberations for a defeated nation. With little room for deity in the Darwinian universe, the notion of the immortal soul was cast into doubt: man was related to the ape, not to the angel. This displacement of man from the center of creation, converging with the waning importance of France, would have numerous echoes in Redon's work, beginning with the fallen angels of the immediate post-war period. (fig. 7) Redon's corporeal fallen angels have lost their divine status. Darkly pensive or sullenly looking back toward the heavens, they are earth-bound fated mortals, with thoughts imprisoned in their material existence.
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