Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  The inn was as dark and rambling as du Maurier's description, and its proud claim of ghosts seemed plausible. In the official souvenir guide, various specters, including that of murder victim Charlotte Dymond (d. 1844) and a dead man returning to finish his half tankard of ale, howl in the wind or walk through the cold walls of the du Maurier Restaurant. On this day, however, the only ghost likely to materialize was the taxidermist responsible for all this zaniness: Mr. Walter Potter.

  Potter was born in 1835 in Bramber, Sussex, where his parents owned the White Lion Inn, a well-known hostelry. As a young man, Potter dropped out of the village school to work at the inn, eventually saving enough money to pursue his main passion in life: taxidermy. He began humbly enough with his deceased pet canary, followed by a family of his pet albino rats (lot 93), before advancing to dogs, cats, and common English birds. Soon Potter's parents gave him a loft above their stable to use as a workshop. But what to do with all those stuffed cuckoos, bramble finches, and nightingales?

  Potter considered himself primarily an artist but was known as a naturalist, a term that covered a lot of ground in the early 1800s. Anyone who wanted to be a naturalist—from Charles Darwin to the lowly weekend egg hunter—was a naturalist. All you did was declare yourself one. Degrees were unnecessary; indeed, natural history wasn't even formally taught in school until the 1880s. Though by mid-century people had begun to specialize and call themselves botanists and zoologists, natural history was still the preoccupation of the passionate amateur driven by blind curiosity, and therefore it tended to be romantic and idiosyncratic—just like Potter's museum.

  Eventually, Potter was able to support himself as a commercial taxidermist. However, stuffing dogs and cats for Victorian parlors would never satisfy his creative impulse. That would happen only after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Held in London's Crystal Palace, the fair celebrated progress: engineers, artists, and, of course, taxidermists displayed their finest work for a curious public hungry for science. If Potter attended (very likely), he would have seen the dramatic realism of Newcastle ornithologist John Hancock's gyrfalcons in action poses. His raptors captured the "jizz" (a birding term that means the general impression and shape), a significant breakthrough. Some displays audaciously featured "group mounts" of several animals posed together—a bit too much art and real estate for British museums. But nothing thrilled more than the taxidermic adaptation of Goethe's fable Reinecke the Fox, a comic depiction of the fable reenacted with semihuman foxes. As ridiculous as foxes dressed as small people may sound, the painstaking care Herrmann Ploucquet of the Royal Museum in Stuttgart had used to manipulate his foxes' facial expressions raised the taxidermic bar, and the Victorians, always mawkish, were smitten. They loved Ploucquet's foxes. They gazed at them for as long as the crowd allowed. Indeed, they felt "indebted" to Ploucquet and his clever foxes, which overpowered just about every other taxidermic display at the Crystal Palace that year—except, of course, for another of his entries, a frog shaving another frog, a display that Queen Victoria herself found amusing.

  Known (without irony) as the grotesque school, Plouc-quet's style became very popular, as taxidermists henceforth transformed animals into little humans: crows playing the violin, squirrels as Romeo, kittens at the gristmill, and frogs doing all sorts of things—sitting for a portrait; lying in a hammock; doing the cancan; and dressed as barbers, longshoremen, pedagogues, drum majors, duelists, bootblacks, King Lear, and, of course, taxidermists. Montagu Browne's famous late-nineteenth-century manual Practical Taxidermy has a section devoted entirely to "mirth-provoking characters." His advice is succinct: use frogs. His second choice is monkeys: "not half so funny" and more cumbersome to mold.

  After the exhibition, taxidermy blossomed. Professional collectors and taxidermists had finally overcome some of their earlier technical blunders, and it became easier to preserve natural things. The ranks of professional taxidermists soared. More taxidermists meant more information, published in all sorts of pamphlets and manuals, which were widely read. Taxidermists began to model clay under skins to replicate muscles, folds, and wrinkles, and their mounts, though still gross approximations, became, if not lifelike, frightfully alive. Upright grizzly bears flaunted claws as long as tusks and fang-filled snarls; "roaring" lions had bubblegum pink gums and impasto tongues. "The days of birds on 'hat-pegs' stiff-legged long-necked and staring round-eyed, at nothing...[have] passed away forever; and only in dreary museums, far behind the age, where funeral silence obtains, and where the dust of mummified animals rises to awe and half poison the adventurous explorer, are these 'specimens' to be found," declared Browne.

  Soon every middle-class home had an ornamental mount on display. Tailors and milliners regularly sought out the local taxidermist for feathers or whole birds to incorporate into their wares. Even certain hairstyles incorporated stuffed hummingbirds. Eventually, a whole subeconomy of trade-skin dealers and wildfowlers sprang up, which served taxidermists by offering hundreds of thousands of skins for sale at auction and at Leadenhall Market in London. The price list in a 1904 taxidermy manual shows that every living species had potential as home décor, including the ivory-billed woodpecker and the passenger pigeon, which may help explain their eventual demise.

  By 1880, every town in England could support a part-time taxidermist, and taxidermists began to specialize to distinguish themselves. Rowland Ward became known for savage trophies, pets, and fake dodos; Peter Spicer for fox masks; John Cooper for fish.

  Here's how Potter started. In 1854, three years after the Great Exhibition, Potter, barely twenty, was flipping through his sister's hand-colored book of nursery rhymes, Peter Parley's Present. In it, he discovered an illustrated version of the popular poem "The Death and Burial of Cock Robin" and in a burst of passion knew what to do with his storehouse of British birds. (The story in a nutshell: Cock Robin is struck with an arrow, bleeds to death, and is buried by his animal friends, who mourn the great loss.) Seven years later, Potter exhibited Cock Robin at the White Lion Inn, causing a sensation. The five-by-six-foot mahogany case contains ninety-eight British birds in a reenactment so fastidiously rendered that a few feathered friends actually shed glass tears. The bereaved birds walk in a sorrowful cortege through a tiny graveyard and up a sloping path toward Bramber Castle and Church. (Potter often painted local scenes as backdrops.) Every character is here: the parson, the clerk, the sparrow who shot the fatal arrow, the fly who watched him die, the fish who caught his blood in his dish, the beetle who made the shroud with his needle, the dove (chief mourner for his love), and the bull as bell toller, because, of course, the bull can pull. Three pall-bearing robins stand near the tiny blue coffin, while a cuckoo, a nightingale, a goldfinch, a hawfinch, and a bramble finch mourn in the treetops above, "a-sighing and a-sobbing when they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin."

  From then on, Potter was besieged with commissions to stuff deceased pets, and he never had to work as a plumassier (someone who works with plumes), or a natural history agent (a purveyor of egg drills, entomological collecting tins, botanical papers, and other collecting supplies), or, oddly enough, a hairdresser—all jobs Victorian taxidermists listed on their trade labels to supplement their incomes. But stuffing other people's dogs and cats (quite a few are in the museum) did not satisfy him. And so, thanks to the fame of Cock Robin, he began to create other taxidermic masterworks, starting with the nursery rhymes The Babes in the Wood and The House That Jack Built and ending his career with the feline extravaganza The Kittens' Wedding (twenty kittens in black morning suits and cream-colored brocade dresses attend the nuptials of a dashing bewhiskered couple).

  The attention to detail is insane. In Rabbits' Village School (lot 44), forty-eight newborn rabbits, each with its own writing slate, sit in an 1888 schoolhouse. A group of lapine scholars practices penmanship using inkwells Potter cut out of chalk (a rabbit cries when he blots his book); a female schoolmistress teaches her young rabbit girls how to knit (one bunny has turned the he
el of a sock); a naughty bunny attempts to cheat off his neighbor, who is furiously working out a math equation, while the master checks another bunny's sums; and the little scholars learn about the Westminster Bridge as one eager bunny in the back waves his paw, hoping to be called on.

  Potter had a dry wit. Most of the tableaux mock and mimic Victorian society or contain subtle jokes. In The Kittens' Wedding, the feline parson has his prayer book open to the wrong page, and a male guest sits in the back of the church, scowling at the bride's choice of groom. In The Guinea Pigs' Cricket Match, the band strikes up a song; one guinea pig musician can't tear himself away from the game, and the furry little conductor seethes on hind legs.

  Potter wasn't a traveling or field naturalist who left insular England to find exotic new species on other continents. He never strayed far from home. His pleasures were simple, his habits metronomic. He loved to garden and was warden of Bramber Church. Every night he wandered into the inn's bar at precisely 9:50 P.M. for his daily pint.

  In a circa 1880 postcard, a dapper but baggy-eyed Potter sits outside his museum, now a quaint stone cottage across the street from his house. He has a hooked nose and a bushy white mustache that extends below his chin in two long columns, and he's wearing a boater (a stiff straw hat). Lush foliage surrounds the museum, the arched front door is flanked by two flower-filled urns, and a sign above the windows SAYS OPEN DAILY.

  In his lifetime, Potter stuffed innumerable English birds and the occasional tusked rabbit (lot 462), but his raison d'être and the museum's main draw was his anthropomorphic tableaux.

  Potter died in 1918 at age eighty-two, having seen British taxidermy rise to its pinnacle of popularity and then fall to its near-deepest depths. By 1914, after industrialization and hunting had resulted in the near extinction of numerous species and the destruction of their habitats, people stopped collecting. Taxidermy was unfashionable; only the big firms, such as Rowland Ward's and Edward Gerrard and Sons, survived. In addition, natural history in general no longer belonged to the passionate amateur (to which taxidermists have always belonged) but instead had become the exclusive domain of the specialist (scientists, curators, and "concept people"). Taxonomy was the guiding principle museums used to organize their zoological collections; evolution was transforming everything. And to be a taxonomist, or any scientist for that matter, required training and expertise. Although these changes were necessary for science to progress, they kind of spoiled the fun, at least from a Victorian perspective. By the end of the nineteenth century, as Lynn Barber notes in her fabulous book The Heyday of Natural History, museums would become (more or less) like they are today: highly specialized and rigorously organized, with collections so vast and varied that they couldn't all possibly be shown to the public. So the layperson was barred from the inner sanctum. As Barber eloquently puts it, "Once the heart is hidden away, a museum's public rooms begin to seem rather lifeless—in Victorian terms—vulgar, rather than rational amusement." Only at places like Potter's could one experience nature as if through a kaleidoscope.

  When Potter died, the museum passed to his daughter Minnie Collins, then to his grandson Walter Collins, who kept it alive despite the fact that many other taxidermy collections went on the market in the 1930s or were destroyed in bonfires. When Walter Collins died in 1972, the museum was sold to Anthony Irving, founder of the House of Pipes, which is how it acquired its opium pipes and spittoons. The museum was resold the same year and moved briefly to Brighton (next to the Palace Pier) and then to Arundel in Sussex, where it was set up in a mock-Tudor house.

  In 1986, the museum was for sale again, and Jamaica Inn owners John and Wendy Watts bought the entire collection and moved it to the inn. They spent the next seventeen years restoring the collection, supplementing it with mounts preserved by other Victorian taxidermists. (Gerrard's wrinkly, walleyed trophies—a black rhino head, a tiger, a polar bear, a lion, a puma, and a giraffe—fill an entire wall.) Back in yet another inn, Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities looked implausibly unaltered.

  Now the Wattses had decided to retire and let their son, daughter, and son-in-law run the inn. That was the reason for the auction. This new generation of owners appreciated Potter's taxidermy but wanted more space for bedrooms, christenings, and wedding receptions. "If someone wanted to have a wedding here today, we couldn't do it because we are fully booked," explained Kevin Moore, the Wattses' son-in-law, at lunch that afternoon in the timber-beamed du Maurier Restaurant. "Something had to go."

  At first the Wattses tried to keep the collection intact by selling it as a single entity. They advertised it to all the national museums and on numerous Internet sites, hoping that the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), which featured The Kittens' Wedding in its 2001 exhibit "The Victorian Vision: Inventing New Britain," or some other big museum would step in and buy the core cases. Moore gave eleven radio interviews in the United States, Canada, and England. CNN and NBC both covered the sale, along with, of course, the BBC and dozens of British publications, including the Spectator, National Post, Times, Daily Telegraph, Independent, Financial Times, and New Statesman.

  "We tried to sell it as a complete unit, but we didn't get one offer," Moore said. "We didn't see the Natural History Museum or the British Museum. No correspondence from the V&A. We would have been happy with that. We probably would have accepted a reasonable offer ... in order to keep it all together." At this point, Moore turned a bit flush. "Figures have been kicked around by the press but not by us."

  The Death and Burial of Cock Robin had the highest presale estimate: £5,000 to £7,000. Everyone wondered who would buy it. Would Cock Robin actually leave the public view? Would it leave Great Britain for the first time in 142 years?

  Pat Morris had arrived the day before to lend support to the Wattses, who were understandably nervous, wondering if perhaps it was a mistake to break up a collection that they had rescued from a similar fate. The guild members said it was an honor to attend the auction with Morris, and I did feel privileged to tour the place with someone who had served as an adviser to the museum and had spent decades collecting, archiving, and researching Victorian taxidermy. Morris was famous here; the Bonhams press release described him as "a leading authority on taxidermy in the U.K."

  Morris led me up a narrow staircase and into the museum, where we vanished into a compartmentalized version of the natural world. I followed him through a maze of crooked corridors packed with hundreds of domed birds, each more vibrant than the next. Tropical butterflies pinned to boards like patterned wallpaper, jars of zoological horrors floating in spirits the color of Kool-Aid, and fantastic typologies of hawkmoths and minerals and sea horses and nautilus shells covered every surface. Horns and trophies lined the walls and rafters. Birds with outstretched wings too huge for domes hung down from the ceiling.

  Just about every craze I had read about (and plenty of others) was represented in this room, each some obsessive attempt to understand—or, really, to accumulate—the natural world. Spiders, scorpions, and corals; dragonflies, African beetles, and migrating monarch butterflies—all were meticulously arranged in glass cases like rare jewels. Floating in jars of spirits were dissected frogs, grass snakes, a porcupine, a sea mouse, and a lung-fish. There was a bisected rabbit head and a kitten with two bodies. I couldn't believe you could actually buy this stuff, but you could. And people would, the next two days.

  Victorians may look uptight in photos, but they flocked to tidal pools to collect sea anemones, shot and stuffed owls, foraged for ferns for fern albums, robbed nests of eggs for oology cases, and netted butterflies and pinned them to corkboards. Each year came some exciting new fad.

  All these marvels existed at Potter's in one form or another. Random and cluttered, lacking wall text and any open space at all, Potter's was the exact opposite of the Smithsonian. I wondered whether contemporary museums had perhaps become too scripted ("Come Meet Your Relatives!") or whether I was enjoying something here at Potter's that I was supposed to be
too sophisticated to enjoy. If I ignored some of the conspicuous add-ons (tribal weapons and military memorabilia), it was possible to envision England as a nation of self-taught naturalists. The power of these relics to prompt the imagination was as strong today as it had been 150 years earlier, and I kept asking myself how that was possible.

  Normally, Morris has a measured walk and a serious demeanor. In here, he grinned like a kid, and his gait had some spring in it. He'd been in here hundreds of times, and I could see why. To be surrounded by the "freaks and fancies of nature" (Charles Waterton, 1825) was incredible. It's hard to stay composed when surrounded by curiosities that are horrific and beautiful at once.

  There was a "reverse taxonomy" to it, a randomness that was both naive and playful. Victorian bird mounts, Morris noted, were often formed with near-total disregard for ornithological exactitude, and birds from three different continents were often grouped together to show off their colors and plumage, as opposed to their species relationship. Distorted and often mounted without support wires in their legs, these domed creatures did not convey a bird's real anatomy. A group of Potter's Australian and South American birds, for example, resembled Christmas tree ornaments, with bodies unnaturally bent at the neck and outstretched wings resembling the fans of a flamenco dancer.

  By the mid-1800s, serious ornithologists grouped complete bird families together as a sort of three-dimensional field guide. The great hall at Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, for instance, has extraordinary bird cases filled with gannets, auks, puffins, owls, hawks, ducks, pheasants, and species likely to be seen near the estate. However, your average Victorian—the type of person likely to visit Potter's—wasn't interested in a scientific investigation as much as an exotic escape from his drab existence. Yet Victorian enthusiasm for nature was a serious hobby, a passionate pursuit.