In France, modern landscape painting established itself around the Barbizon school. But its paintings vindicate a confrontation with nature which is mostly incurious of either animals or the details of vegetation. Things are however different with the paintings and engravings of one of their number, Karl Bodmer. In 1870, he published, with Théophile Gauthier, an illustrated book entitled La Nature chez elle. This work exhibits an entirely different Fontainebleau forest, one peopled with lives in a thousand forms. This paper presents two hypotheses: first, that a specific history, that of the scorn shown by modern civilisation for the life of non-humans, can be correlated with the history of the aesthetic scorn for illustrated forms beyond the reach of « Great Art »; secondly, that our modern utopias, calling for cohabitation with all forms of life, found their first shapes in illustrative works.