Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  This might explain the odd pairings. They weren't haphazard—Potter was as purpose driven as any Victorian—but his gift for merging spectacle with science to entertain his customers was superior. Thus the seal cub with the greater kudu skin and elephant soles; the beagle head with the lamb skeleton; the two-faced kitten with the goldfinch and immature flycatcher. I couldn't quite wrap my mind around Potter's Californian Curiosities: a horned toad, a tarantula, a scorpion, a centipede, a deformed calf head, and, of course, ostrich and springbok skins (lot 130). But the magic of this place was that I didn't have to. For all the Victorians' moralizing, nothing in here was didactic. The whole point was to marvel.

  "He collected freaks!" one trader gasped, astonished by one of Potter's deformed specimens. "You won't see this again!" another dealer said, racing from case to case.

  Potter was fascinated by freaks. He got them from a local farmer. We encountered his two-faced puppy with three eyes and two mouths; his two-faced kitten with four eyes, two faces, and two mouths; his three-legged duckling (with, of course, a corncrake and a starling)—all mounted in the late 1800s at the end of his career. The Victorians loved the distorted and the macabre; unwrapping mummies and public dissections were popular forms of parlor entertainment. So, apparently, do we.

  The more ghastly the specimen, the larger the pre-auction crowd. Nothing drew more people than the Siamese twin fetal piglets in lime green formaldehyde. I edged over for a closer look. Two pink snouts (or was it a single snout with four nostrils?) were pressed against the bell-shaped glass in surreal symmetry. Four shriveled pink legs were crammed into the jar's base. Rumors circulated that prop seekers for the Harry Potter films were after the conjoined swine, and the tension mounted among traders who lusted after only the pickled piglets. Factions were forming. They sized up each other's reserves. They walked past the Siamese swine feigning indifference.

  Thankfully, except for a mummified hand, the museum had no human specimens. It sounds crazy, but the Victorians did preserve people. According to a New York Times article about "El Negro" (an African man preserved in the 1830s by two French taxidermists, displayed in a Spanish museum, and then buried in Botswana in 2000), human preservation was not uncommon: "To stuff and exhibit a dead person, one taxidermist advised...'it is necessary to make a circular incision around the fingertips and peel back the skin as if it were a glove.'" One preserved human is the British economist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who donated his body to University College London. This is Morris's old haunt. Morris called the specimen "Old Bentham" and said that I could find him seated in a chair in a big armoire in the main building of the South Cloister—except for his head, which was replaced with a wax replica after some students played soccer with his real head (at least according to the guards who unlocked the armoire for me). His real head is taken out only for ceremonial dinners, to satisfy the clause in the economist's will requiring his presence at such events.

  Although Potter's freaks sent shivers down his guests' spines, the anthropomorphic scenes delighted them. Morris smiled drolly when he came upon Potter's tableau The Happy Family (lot 55), a zoological fantasy for sure. Here Potter created in taxidermy what you'd never see in a forest: barn owls and a falcon adoringly watch mice play; a cat (a robin perched on its head and a mouse on its back) reclines with a dog under a shady tree; a rabbit cuddles with a stoat. The scene is cloyingly sentimental and surreal, but what it lacks in realism, it makes up for in heartfelt affection.

  I still hadn't seen The Death and Burial of Cock Robin, and Morris and I squeezed through the crowd to find it. The case is huge, far bigger than I had imagined, and utterly filled with birds. It is dazzling. Seeing Cock Robin in person is a lot like viewing a famous painting that you have only seen in photographs—the Mona Lisa, for instance. Up close, the avian mourners look pitiful. The owl (spade in talons) seems particularly distressed by seeing the vandalized bones of one of Cock Robin's relatives.

  I felt like a schoolgirl gazing into Lord & Taylor's Christmas windows: how easy it is to become lost in these glass-encased wonderlands. I tried to burn it all into my memory, because there'd be no second viewing. But when I remembered that I was looking at birds at a funeral, which is really very silly and morbid at the same time, I quickly moved on.

  Squirrels are something I know something about because I see them all over New York City, but I had never seen squirrels drinking port or dueling to win the affection of a female squirrel. Potter's squirrels drink booze. They smoke cigars. They gamble and play cribbage.

  I wandered over to The Upper Ten (aka The Squirrels' Club) and its companion piece, The Lower Five (or The Rats' Den). Potter chose the names, which come from a popular Victorian song, to show how aware he was of his era's rigid class distinctions. The Upper Ten is a Victorian men's club where squirrels drink port and play poker in a dollhouse of decadence. Things are far cruder in The Lower Five, where fifteen large brown rats ("the riff-raff") smoke and gamble in a ramshackle public house; a rat bobby in hat and cape has burst in to interrogate the rodents. I laughed out loud, knowing the British traders wouldn't mistake my laughter for politically incorrect glee. Instead, I was sure they were sizing me up as part of the competition.

  Each case took years to make, and that's because Potter was an uncompromising taxidermist, especially when it came to coat color. When the exact right skins did turn up (red squirrels from nearby Winston Park; kittens from Wards Farm in Henfield; rabbits from a breeder in Beeding; rats supplied by old stuffed Spot, Potter's dog [lot 238]), he'd replace his cardboard templates with actual fur. Morbid as this process may sound, a 1977 museum catalog says that he never killed anything specifically for the museum, though a nearby farmer periodically killed large litters of kittens and gave Potter first dibs. Interestingly, Potter banned black cats (dead or alive) from the museum because they were associated with witchcraft.

  An artist who visited Potter's as a child had returned for the auction. He peered at the squirrels, overwhelmed by the strange hold they had on him. "All that beauty and horror—how you really love it and are repulsed by it at the same time," he said, shaking his head without taking his eyes off the case. The fact that the players were squirrels or kittens mattered little to Potter or to other Victorians, who affectionately imbued animals with human characteristics (pathos, humor) without irony or detachment. Imagine Beatrix Potter, for example.

  In The Postmodern Animal, an academic book about animals in contemporary art, Steve Baker describes the exact opposite condition: anthropomorphophobia, a fear of being overly sentimental about animals. In fact, he uses the term to describe Emily Mayer, because artists need critical distance to maintain an edge. Victorians would have scoffed. For them, anthropomorphism was good and rational, the most pious way to identify with God's creatures. To see oneself as separate from nature, now that was something to be afraid of!

  Nevertheless, at the guild show, Phil Howard, a taxidermist with the National Museum of Scotland, had told me that because Potter's humanistic mounts were something beyond nature, they trivialized taxidermy and contributed to its tawdry reputation. He's not alone in that belief. Many sane people find kittens dressed as tiny brides vile and exceedingly strange (in fact, it feels ridiculous discussing them now). For Victorians, however, attributing human characteristics to animals was a form of endearment. They were obsessed with knowing, for instance, whether animals were happy. They wanted to discuss the very goodness of animals. For Morris, the transference of human characteristics onto birds and mammals is "the basis for much of what we recognize as the British love of animals."

  I wandered around, as disturbed by the two-faced lamb as I was captivated by the dealers sizing it up. "It's a shame that [the collection is] being broken up, because we're never going to have the opportunity to see it again," one trader remarked. And in the next breath: "But there's plenty to go around. We don't intend to go home empty-handed." Downstairs, auctioneer Roger Tappin registered Peter Blake (the artist
who designed the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover) and dozens others. During the lulls, Tappin was composing lines to "sing" for each lot. The pitch style the auctioneers used to sell the Alfa Romeo the week before, for instance, would never move the 111-pound conger eel (lot 252). This one was catchy: "The wandering albatrosses will fit onto the roof rack." "There's a good one for the lion," he said, grinning. "But you'll have to wait until tomorrow. An auctioneer always tries to save some of his gold."

  Nearby, head auctioneer Jon Baddeley was in between television interviews when I went up to him and repeated the words of the trader upstairs: "It's a shame that it has to be broken up." I tried not to sound indignant.

  "Collections are living things," he explained. "All these things will end up in international museums and institutions. As you break up one collection, you form other collections."

  The phone rang and rang, people asking if Bonhams was prepared to handle the complicated transactions that are required when endangered species cross international borders. In England, any specimen collected before 1947 is considered an antique and can be freely bought and sold within the United Kingdom (although some species such as parrots require special licenses). But in the United States, the same species can't be traded without proper certificates, permits, and inspections administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Species protected under the 1900 Lacey Act, the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act are scrupulously monitored by Fish and Wildlife Service agents, and an extensive paper trail and inspections are required for every importation. For instance, whereas magpies are like rodents in England, in the United States they are protected species, which can't be traded. The same rigorous laws used to prevent animal smuggling apply to 125-year-old antique specimens. Nearly six months after the auction, several Potter cases arrived in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey. They were transported to a bonded warehouse in Kearny, New Jersey, where Fish and Wildlife Service agents dismantled them, confiscating several illegal specimens (a loon, a snipe, and others). After a complicated process of signed wavers, ownership of the birds was transferred to the U.S. government.

  Emma Hawkins, a dealer of"all sorts of wonderful things," mostly Victorian taxidermy, arrived at the Jamaica Inn from Edinburgh, Scotland, and had a look around on preview day. She needed to inspect the condition of items (mostly the large tableaux) before she committed herself to certain lots for her clients. The dealers who buy and sell taxidermy for other people provided me with yet another perspective of this eccentric world. On the one hand, they seemed to recognize the historic value of the collection. On the other hand, they were most eager to buy and sell it off. Still, I was grateful to hook up with Hawkins, because she was meeting two hard-core taxidermy dealers that night to strategize over dinner, and she invited me to join them.

  A year earlier, Hawkins had heard that Potter's was for sale, and she offered the Wattses a significant sum for the entire collection. She wanted to relocate Potter's to Edinburgh and had a building in mind in which to house and maintain it, but her offer wasn't accepted. Hawkins typically avoids auctions, but Potter's was unique. According to Christopher Frost's A History of British Taxidermy, 95 percent of all taxidermic mounts from the Victorian era have disintegrated or are of poor quality: moth-eaten, lumpy, scraggly, threadbare. Potter's mounts, preserved with a secret arsenical formula that died with Potter (typical!), hadn't lost a patch of hair or feathers. They were, in the rarified world of taxidermy collectors, remarkable.

  "To have and to hold," she chirped, a British Holly Golightly. At thirty-one, Hawkins was far younger than the seasoned traders at the Smugglers Bar, but she posed a serious threat because of her unusual tastes, shrewd tactics, and ample resources. "I won't drink tonight so I can keep my eye on the ball," she said without the hint of a smile. Hawkins learned the art of the deal from her father, a jeweler. She discovered the love of taxidermy at home, under a horse-hoof candelabra. Her grandfather was a big-game hunter, and over the years her relatives have given her taxidermy as gifts: at twelve, a giraffe head and neck from the 1890s ("I still have it, and it's in fantastic condition!"); at fifteen, a polar bear head on a shield (to hang above her bed). Ever since she was a child, she has seen the "true delight" in taxidermy.

  Typically, when Hawkins shows up at a client's door, the person is expecting "a mad old woman on the verge of death," not a vivacious brunette with a Prada handbag, a silver necklace strung with seashells, and gold Chinese slippers. "Everybody thinks I'm strange," she said. "I prefer to be strange than normal. I saw a card once that said, 'I was normal until it drove me crazy.'"

  Hawkins scanned the museum, annotating her catalog. Then we climbed into her red Mercedes van and drove to Fowey, the nautical village where Daphne du Maurier lived and wrote. The drive wound past picturesque harbors and lush rolling hills. For Hawkins it was all beside the point. She was meeting Errol Fuller, author and illustrator of books on extinct and rare birds, and Rob Chinnery, owner of the Victorian Taxidermy Company in Leamington Spa. When we arrived in Fowey, I found the last vacancy in town—in a guesthouse run by a red-bearded man with a red ponytail, who resembled one of du Maimer's Cornish wreckers. When he opened the door, he had a live parrot on his shoulder, a shocking sight after so many days among dead things.

  Hawkins checked into the Marina Hotel on the wharf and began riffling through her Bonhams catalog, frenetically writing notes in the margins as she called clients to confer. She had a strategy. It involved her fiancé, who was on telephone standby in Edinburgh. The plan was simple: She'd bid at the auction until her lots reached the price she and her fiancé had agreed on beforehand. When the price climbed above that, she'd set down her paddle, and he'd take up the bidding remotely by phone. Hawkins would watch from the sidelines, feigning a lack of interest. The strategy, fairly common among serious auctiongoers, requires a poker face. Hawkins has one with dimples.

  Whereas Hawkins was here to purchase taxidermy for clients with unusual tastes, Fuller was motivated by his own obsessive habit. Fuller has been collecting Victorian taxidermy since he was fifteen. His house is crammed with taxidermy cases, dinosaur fossils, and prehistoric skulls. There's practically no room to walk. Some of his treasures are exceptionally rare, such as a case of 350 hummingbirds ("appalling" but "beautiful, because of their colors, not faded at all"). He has an ichthyosaur in his living room and an ammonite in his bathroom. One of Rowland Ward's lions that used to belong to Eton College resides in his garage, where he keeps his overflow. But his prize possession is Charles Waterton's saki monkey (a South American species), which was "lost" for 150 years. Fuller found it in an antiques shop in Greenwich. "I'm going to be buried with it!" he said. An amateur boxer turned painter turned self-taught natural historian, Fuller is the author of The Great Auk and The Dodo. "Mostly I've written about extinct things—mostly bones or stuffed ones," he explained. "It's my inability to cope with death. I think it starts with that—just like the Egyptians couldn't cope with it. You can't look at that fox. That individual fox tolls for thee."

  The fox comment is very Victorian, and in some ways so is Fuller. He's a passionate amateur like Charles Darwin or John James Audubon, but instead of traveling to exotic locales to shoot, stuff, and study, say, Galápagos finches, Fuller visits far-flung museums, where he tracks down every known dried skin and plume of the extinct birds he's investigating, which he reproduces in paintings, formulating theories of substantial scientific merit along the way.

  Fuller's obsession with extinct animals is extraordinary. When he wrote The Great Auk, for instance, he spent six years chasing down every great auk skin and egg in existence and had to drive a taxi to finance the book. His book on the dodo, a species that vanished in 1690, was far less grueling to research, because hardly any dodo skins exist, plus "all the known skeletons came from the same swamp in Mauritius."

  "Have you carved up everything without me?" Fuller said to Hawkins as she walked into the restaurant. "She think
s she's outgrown me," he said to me. "She was the greediest little child! Emma tried to buy the whole lot!"

  "I wouldn't buy taxidermy there that wasn't Potter," she said.

  "Most people hate taxidermy for bogus reasons. They think it's disrespect for the dead creatures and that you are promoting it," said Fuller.

  "Taxidermy connotes the taint of bad taste. Why is that?" Fuller's girlfriend asked.

  "Quality affects it," offered Chinnery.

  "It's like pickling your grandmother!" said the girlfriend.

  We sat down to dinner, but instead of menus everyone held up auction catalogs. Images of distorted baby giraffes greeted the waitress. Fuller explained that the auction had no "reserves"; that is, Bonhams had not established a minimum price for each lot and therefore was willing to let it all go—whatever happens, happens. That fact was exciting yet sad.

  Fuller flipped through his catalog, pausing at the duck-billed platypus (lot 182), and said, "I was thinking how badly I wanted that platypus thirty years ago. I would have given anything for it. We'll probably go home with nothing, and the Americans will go home with it."

  "Very beautiful," said Hawkins with a demonic grin that concealed what she was admiring in her own catalog. Fuller yanked the catalog out of her hands. Hawkins yanked it back. Then Fuller's girlfriend threatened to snatch it so she could eat in peace. "We don't need a neutral referee!" Fuller snapped. "This is war!"

  "I'd put three grand on that elephant head," said Chinnery.

  Chinnery, no slouch in this absurdly narrow world, restores Victorian cases and resells them to a highly specialized clientele. One of his customers is his accountant, Mark Godfrey, who was seated at our table. Godfrey's business card didn't say ACCOUNTANT; it said TAXIDERMY COLLECTOR: HUTCHINGS OF ABERYSTWYTH and depicted two barn owls.