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As Real As It
Gets
A
new exhibit at Carnegie Museum of Natural History pulls
out
all the stops to show us just how far we’ve come
in the art of taxidermy—including a famous white
rhino, an albino squirrel, and the “death mask” of
George the gorilla. By
Christine H. O’Toole
The Denmon girls are little sisters from the city. The buffalo’s
a beefy guy from the plains. At their first encounter at Carnegie
Museum of Natural History, all three stood stock-still.
What drew Noa, age 10, and Drue, age 8, to the buffalo’s
side on a Sunday visit was the stuffed creature’s inviting
plush pelt. As they circled the specimen, plunging their fists
into its fur, Drue tilted back her head and looked up admiringly
at the animal’s gentle dark eyes, trying to explain the
attraction.
“
It feels like it could get...alive,” she said intently.
That
first-person experience, closer than any zoo would allow,
is the peculiar fascination celebrated in Stuffed Animals:
The Art and Science of Taxidermy, which opened in the Hall
of Sculpture May 21. With its examples of the ultra-realistic
specimens and dioramas created to give city dwellers a
glimpse of the natural world, the exhibit examines the flip
side
of Carnegie Museum of Art’s current exhibition Fierce
Friends.
Designed by Carnegie Museum of Natural History staff,
Stuffed Animals is the first American examination of the
evolution
of taxidermy, the heart of most American natural history
collections, in at least three decades. The museum’s
110-year-old collection is anchored by some of the finest
re-creations of
animals and animal groups in the world.
Almost the Real Thing
Generations of Pittsburgh children have been thrilled by Jules
Verreaux’s bloodthirsty “Arab Courier Attacked
by Lions,” in which a camel rider fights off a pair
of Barbary lions with scimitar and rifle. One of those enthralled
kids still visits the diorama regularly: Darnell Warren,
who grew up to become an artist and instructor at Carnegie
Museum of Art himself.
“
It’s got such dramatic appeal, and the extinct lions
have historic significance,” Warren professes. “And
there’s a wonderful narrative behind what’s going
on. As a kid, it started my thought process: Would the man
survive? Who would win?”
Warren now brings his drawing
students here to learn from the skills on display inside
the large glass case: artistic
composition
on a grand scale.
“
Taxidermy involves sculpture and anatomy and realism,” says
Steve Rogers, the museum’s long-time collection head
for birds, reptiles, and amphibians, and a taxidermist
himself. “And
when you add a background painting in the dioramas, it’s
the whole package. It’s as complete as you can get.”
The
summer exhibit won’t include the Denmon sisters’ new
best friend, or the Verreaux display, both of which are
on permanent exhibit upstairs. But it will include other
rare
and dramatic mounted specimens—from a pair of rhinos
to massive big-game heads to a famous local gorilla selected
from thousands in the Museum of Natural History’s
scientific collections.
Today’s museum visitors,
accustomed to finding video images of wild animals with
a few clicks on Google, might not
realize the leaps of imagination taken by early taxidermists.
“
A hundred years ago, you’d get a package with a dried
hide, folded and salted, and a few leg bones. Then, you’d
have to figure out what it looked like,” explains
Rogers. Needless to say, that led to some inaccuracies. “With
no muscle definition, the results in minor museums might
look like a stuffed animal on a kid’s bed. They didn’t
look real, because the creators weren’t sculptors.” Through
luck and circumstance, the Museum of Natural History created
its first taxidermy collections with the help of
some early masters of the craft. Rogers, who has traced
the history
of American taxidermy, points to three masters—Frederic
Webster and Remi and Joseph Santens—who set world-class
artistic standards at the museum at the turn of the 20th
century.
Filling an Empty Museum
When he joined the museum in 1897, two years after its
founding by Andrew Carnegie, Frederic Webster was one
of the country’s
leading taxidermists. His closest friends and colleagues,
who were collection heads of the new National and American
Museums
of Natural History, would become his rivals in procuring
the most sensational specimens for America’s empty
museums.
It was a seller’s market, and prices were
steep. And Andrew Carnegie, who purchased some of Webster’s
first acquisitions, understood that the principle of supply
and demand
applied to stuffed animals, too. “Crocodiles are
snapped up as offered, while dugongs bring large prices,” he
quipped in an 1884 book. “What is pig metal to
this?”
The museum seized the chance to acquire the “Arab
Courier” in
about 1898 for $25. In the same era, it received hundreds
of rare specimens from the Good family, a missionary
family in
Gabon and Cameroun with connections to then Carnegie
Museum Director William Holland, a Presbyterian minister.
(A Good
family descendant, anthropology section head Dave Watters,
now works at the museum.) One of those mounts, a gorilla,
will be displayed in Stuffed Animals.
Return of the White Rhino
Another major early purchase was a white rhinoceros, then nearly
extinct. When the museum bought the beast in 1901, it was an
international coup, the stuff of blockbuster exhibits: one
of only four such mounts in the world and the only one on display
in North America.
 A decade later, the white rhino was still
rare enough to make Teddy Roosevelt drop his monocle. “Holland,
where did you get that specimen?” he demanded in a 1912
visit. “I
am astonished at seeing it.”
Stuffed Animals pairs the
white rhino with a later museum re-creation: a black rhino
bagged by Pittsburgher Childs Frick on safari
in 1909. The comparison illustrates how Carnegie Museum experts
vastly improved the realism of their mounts. The white rhino’s
creators, the British firm of Gerrard and Son, had likely
never seen a live one. They relied on a rickety wooden frame
and
wood shavings to approximate its shape. The later mount,
created in 1920 by Remi Santens, used a meticulously molded
plaster
form to simulate muscles under a thinner hide.
The pair was
exhibited together for seven decades and will be reunited
in Stuffed Animals. Two other magnificent Santens
creations, the jaguar family diorama and the 12-foot giraffe,
still command attention in the museum’s second-floor
Hall of African Mammals exhibit of spectacular dioramas. Always popular with hunters (even early Native Americans
mounted animals), taxidermy became enormously popular with
adults and
youngsters during the beginning of the 20th century. One
mail-order course enrolled over 35,000 amateurs. The museum’s
new exhibit includes the work of one of them, an ambitious
10-year-old
named Rush Davis.
Davis was convinced that the rare creature
he’d found
and mounted—an albino grey squirrel—was worthy
of a spot in Carnegie Museum’s collection. In his
first correspondence with the museum in 1904, he boldly
named his
price—$25—which museum Director Holland briskly
deemed “excessive.” After bombarding Holland
with several more letters, Davis finally received $7.50
for his
work. Hunter and Conservationist
Another student in the museum’s mail-order course was
Teddy Roosevelt, whose enthusiasm for wildlife led him to found
the Boone & Crockett Club (B&P) in 1887. (He also presented
the museum with a black rhino, shot shortly before his visit
here. A fiberglass copy of it stands in the Hall of African
Wildlife.)
The B&C Club preached “fair chase” hunting
ethics, as well as keeping records on the biggest trophies
shot and mounted by its members. Carnegie Museums stored
some of those prize winners until the early 1990s. A
massive moose
head from the club, its rack measuring 68 inches from tip
to tip, crowns the Stuffed Animals exhibit and commemorates
the
big-game era. Now headquartered in Montana, the Boone & Crockett
club still exists, supporting sustainability and conservation.
Conservationists
of the 21st century are far less likely to be the wealthy
big-game hunters of the past, or the hunter-gatherers
of the African savannah.
But they recognize that recreational hunters also care for the environment.
“
People who hunt for recreation often feel strongly about the conservation
of species. Through revenue they provide from licenses and their interest
in the
preservation of habitats, they may be contributing to the overall well-being
of animals,” notes museum Director Bill DeWalt.
But not all of
the animals mounted for the museum’s collection were hunted;
some died of natural causes.
 Carnegie
Museum Director William Holland (seated at left) observes
as his staff works its magic.
The museum has accepted specimens from
the Pittsburgh Zoo since its founding in 1898. When George the
gorilla, a longtime resident, died
in 1979,
the museum modeled his facial features through essentially the
same kind of
death mask
sculptors use to capture human bone structure, muscles and wrinkles.
The mask helped museum staffers re-create the fleshy contours in
the final
mount, used
later in a diorama. In Stuffed Animals, George’s mask is
included to illuminate one of the museum’s earlier
efforts: the 1899 mount of an African gorilla from the
Good missionary family. Comparison
of the two make glaringly clear how early
taxidermists wrestled with the issue of reproducing the indentations
and curves of their subjects’ faces. (Visitors touring Fierce
Friends this summer at the Museum of Art will find the 1899 gorilla’s
skeleton on display there, accenting the connection between science
and art.)
The buffalo, the Denmon sisters’ please-touch
favorite in the Hall of American Indians, came to the
museum after a long
life, with the blessing of
Native Americans. After a full religious ceremony performed by
Rosalie Little Thunder, complete with burning sagebrush and prayers,
the animal was put down
in 1998 and went on display shortly thereafter.
Interest in conservation
and animal habitats began to broaden to city dwellers
as the 20th century progressed. The museum complemented
its
large-scale
dioramas with smaller animals to introduce Pittsburghers to
local residents. “
The settings perfectly replicated real habitats, and the emphasis
shifted from single creatures to natural family groups,” explains
Rogers. He adds that Frederic Webster, a perfectionist, insisted
on high fidelity. He re-created
the habitat of golden-winged warblers by locating a sheltered
nest, then removed two surrounding square feet of natural
materials intact so he could replicate
its details.
Sometimes the insistence on minute detail demanded
armies of volunteers to work alongside taxidermists and
muralists. For
the Alaskan moose
diorama, mounted in 1970, a committee of women volunteers
donated 1,100 hours
to create
perfect
faux leaves for its alders (2,000 leaves), willow (1,800),
and cranberry (3,200 for one bush). The fox, possum, and
owl families
displayed
in Stuffed Animals
match that level of realism.
“
Dioramas can really provide an accurate depiction of biological diversity,” says
Bill DeWalt. “Even in a zoo, there’s no way to get as close to
animals as you can get to a diorama. And in a zoo, you’re looking at
them in a habitat that is not their own.
“
There was a time in which dioramas fell out of favor in museums because they
were static,” admits DeWalt, “but major museums have invested substantially
in conserving and improving spectacular dioramas.
“
Our perspective here is to make the dioramas come alive by adding touchables
and touch screens, making them a more interactive exhibit,” he adds. “A
computer screen that tells you what animals ate, or how many existed, helps
the animal come wonderfully to life. They have so much more to tell us.”
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Copyright (c)
2006 CARNEGIE Magazine. All rights reserved.