Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  William Hornaday's quote is from the 1916 edition of Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting.

  Though separated by ninety-three years, Ken Walker's nine-month appointment at the Smithsonian echoed that of his hero, Robert Rockwell, who worked there for nine months in 1910. I drew information about Rockwell's time at the Smithsonian from his autobiography My Way of Becoming a Hunter.

  Of all the brief accounts of James Smithson's bequest, my favorite is in Lynn Barber's The Heyday of Natural History. For a history of the Smithsonian Institution, see http://siarchives.si.edu/history/main_generalhistory.html.

  After the mammal hall opening, several newspapers and news services reviewed it, including the Washington Post, Winston-Salem Journal, Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dallas Morning News, Austin American-Statesman, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Scripps Howard News Service, and Associated Press. Of them, the Architectural Record's piece (November 1, 2004) was especially helpful in describing the high-tech wizardry designers used to create the hall's special effects and sound-and-light shows. Paul Rhymer's personal account appears in Taxidermy Today (August 2004). The Smithsonian's Office of Public Affairs' press materials provided further details about the massive renovation of the West Wing and its prior usage.

  Sally Love's take on dioramas ran in the Baltimore Sun on November 28, 2003.

  I read about the Fenykovi elephant's anus (and the giraffe's clay privates, mentioned earlier in the chapter) in the Baltimore Sun (November 28, 2003).

  I learned about how the Natural History Museum evacuated specimens during World War II in William T. Stearn's book The Natural History Museum at South Kensington (Heinemann, 1981).

  5. THE CHAIRBITCH

  This chapter was drawn primarily from interviews with Emily Mayer and her family, friends, and colleagues. The Times of London's "Stuff Art: This Is a Life and Death Thing" (August 16, 2000) and Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal (Reaktion Books, 2000) provided further insight into Mayer's career. For Mayer's take on her own artwork, I relied on her artist's statements in the catalogs for two of her solo shows, "Out of Context" (Campden Gallery, Gloucestershire, England, 2007) and "Material Evidence" (Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, Ireland, 1995). Mayer's master's thesis, "Representing Animality: The Nature of the Representation of Animals in Contemporary Taxidermy and Contemporary Sculpture" (Norwich School of Art and Design, 1990), demonstrates the deeply complex relationship Mayer has with animals, in art and in life.

  I read about Damien Hirst in his books I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now (Booth-Clibborn, 1997; I used the 2005 edition) and On the Way to Work, a series of interviews with Hirst by the British writer Gordon Burn (Universe, 2002; I used the 2007 edition).

  Erosion molding is described in A Guide to Model Making and Taxidermy by Leo J. Cappel (A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1973).

  Emily Mayer and John Loker let me keep their copy of Dipped in Vitriol by Nicholas Parsons (Pan Books, 1981).

  Pets, Usual and Unusual by Maxwell Knight was originally published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. I used the 1962 edition.

  Irmelin Mayer and I stayed up very late one night talking about Emily's childhood and flipping through family scrapbooks. The next day, she generously let me photocopy all the articles about Emily. The titles alone bear mentioning: "Girl Taxidermist Loves Job"; "OK, Where Does a Taxidermist Pick Up a Dead Camel?"; "Emily Can Ferret Out a Bargain!"; "She Keeps Bodies: Unusual Job for Emily, 19"; "Tinker, Tailor, Taxidermist"; "Chipping In with the Fish"; "Illustrious Corpses"; "Get Stuffed! If You'll Pardon the Expression"; "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of"; "Dead Clever; Change of Course as Emily Tackles Sculpture"; "Life After Death."

  Emily and Irmelin Mayer graciously provided me with sources on Lotte Pritzel. These include Lotte Pritzel: Puppen des Lasters des Grauens und der Ekstase (Puppentheatermuseum, 1987); Hans Bellmer, a biography of the controversial surrealist by Peter Webb (Quartet Books, 1985); "'They've Got Souls of White Cotton, the Little Darlings!': Lotte Pritzel and Her Wax Figurines," an unpublished scholarly work by Barbara Borek; and "Fragments," Irmelin Mayer's unpublished autobiographical work about growing up in Nazi-era Berlin.

  The quote comparing a Hirst show to Jack the Ripper perpetrating a crime is from Richard Shone's essay "Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away" in the catalog for the show (Serpentine Gallery, London, 1994).

  For a deeper understanding of how England and America differed in their approaches to natural history and specimen collecting, see Joyce Chaplin's article "Nature and Nation: Natural History in Context," in Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730—1860, edited by Sue Ann Prince (American Philosophical Society, 2003).

  I read about how Lionel Walter Rothschild liked to outbid the British Museum in The Heyday of Natural History by Lynn Barber. "My Museum: The Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, Tring" by Tring's bird skins preparator Katrina Cook appeared in the 2006 issue of Taxidermist; it describes the history of the museum and what it contains today. The anecdote about how the baron was blackmailed into selling off his peerless bird collection is from Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston (St. Martin's Press, 1986).

  For information about the Powell-Cotton Museum, see "Quex House and the Powell-Cotton Museum" by Richard Crowhurst, www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/museums/quex.shtml, 2006. Also see the Powell-Cotton Museum Web site, www.quexmuseum.org.

  Charles Waterton may have been exasperating, but he was never boring. This made writing about him painful, because I had to omit how he used to crawl under a table and bark like a dog, along with just about everything he ever said or wrote. The surviving Waterton quotes and quirks are chiefly drawn from his somewhat reliable expedition memoir Wanderings in South America. I used the 1889 edition, which includes an endearing biography of the squire (complete with drawings of Walton Hall's pigpens, breeding tower, and lofty trees) by the Reverend J. G. Wood, as well as an explanatory essay on his taxidermy methods. I found his quote about possessing "Promethean boldness" and his use of Horace's "By laboring to be brief you become obscure" in an essay by Dr. J. B. Holder in the SAT's 1884 annual report; they are also in Wanderings.

  For the account of the Nondescript, I used Wanderings. Author Errol Fuller e-mailed his own very endearing description, and Lynn Barber describes this "taxidermic frolic" in The Heyday of Natural History.

  The Watertonian terms "pseudo-classical phraseology" and "complimentary nomenclature" are from the biography by Wood in Wanderings. "You must possess Promethean boldness..." and "A hideous spectacle of death in ragged plumage" are from Wanderings.

  Montagu Browne calls Waterton an "eccentric genius" and "pioneer" and also describes his methods for making peacock faces and scraping out ape feet in his two manuals: Practical Taxidermy: Manual of Instruction to the Amateur in Collecting, Preserving, and Setting Up Natural History Specimens of All Kinds, 2nd ed. (L. Upcott Gill, 1884), and Artistic and Scientific Taxidermy and Modelling (Adam and Charles Black, 1896).

  "Chairbitch is OK too" is from "View from the Chair," Emily Mayer's inaugural letter as chair to the guild journal, Taxidermist (2002).

  Kim McDonald's article "E-bay—You Are Being Watched! Internet Auctions and the Natural History Specimen" ran in Taxidermist in 2006. The Get Stuffed scandal has been widely publicized in the United Kingdom. The Independent ran a story on it at the time on February 2, 2000, and the Guardian covered it retrospectively on August 8, 2008. The Birmingham Evening Mail reported that the Metropolitan Police Wildlife Crime Unit seized more than twenty thousand endangered species in 2000.

  The history of the Guild of Taxidermists is from Emily Mayer's graduate thesis, "Representing Animality," and Christopher Frost's A History of British Taxidermy.

  Information about Rowland Ward and his illustrious wildlife studio primarily came from Pat Morris's self-published monograph Rowland Ward: Taxidermist to the World (2003), w
hich also has amazing photos. Front and Wonders ("Habitat Dioramas") also cover Ward.

  "The Antiquity of the Duchess of Richmond's Parrot," Pat Morris's account of how he x-rayed the duchess's stuffed African grey parrot, appeared in Museums Journal 81, no. 3 (1981). I went to Westminster Abbey to see the parrot in 2003.

  6. MR. POTTER'S MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIES

  Daphne du Maurier was inspired to write Jamaica Inn after an ill-fated outing on Bodmin Moor. The story goes like this: One day she was staying at the Jamaica Inn and went out riding in the moor with a friend. A storm broke, and they were forced to seek shelter in an abandoned cottage. Eventually, their horses led the way through the treacherous moor back to the inn. For further information about du Maurier and her relationship to Cornwall, see www.dumaurier.org, which has a bibliography and numerous related links.

  The infamous Jamaica Inn—its smugglers, ghosts, murderers, and barren moor—is described with suitable gore and gothic relish in the resort's souvenir guide, Jamaica Inn and Museum.

  I read about Peale's, Scudder's, and Drake's museums in the SAT annual reports and also in Charles Coleman Sellers's Mr. Peale's Museum. I also visited the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, site of the original museum.

  I read about the Victorian mania for natural history and the state of science museums in the pre- and post-Darwin era in Lynn Barber's The Heyday of Natural History. This, combined with the general history of taxidermy, helped me create the context in which Walter Potter lived, worked, and built his stupendous collection.

  Bruce Schwendeman and Emma Hawkins generously supplied me with materials from their personal archives, including early catalogs of Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities before it moved to Cornwall. I relied on these to write about Potter's life—what drove him and how he approached taxidermy—and also to trace the evolution of his museum from 1861 to 1986, when John and Wendy Watts bought it. For the museum's post-1986 history, I relied chiefly on the Bonhams press release, interviews, and newspaper articles.

  Pat Morris's splendid article "An Historical Review of Bird Taxidermy in Britain" describes the bird displays at the Great Exhibition of 1851, including John Hancock's gyrfalcons and the original usage of the word "jizz." A History of British Taxidermy by Christopher Frost chronicles taxidermy's rise and fall. It also describes the era's leading taxidermists, such as Hancock and Herrmann Ploucquet and how they practiced their trade during taxidermy's most faddish epoch. Montagu Browne's Practical Taxidermy describes how the Great Exhibition of 1851 led to the rise of artistic taxidermy in Britain.

  Charles Waterton's quotes are from his book Wanderings in South America.

  Calke Abbey is a 1622 country house filled with glass cases containing fascinating collections acquired by several generations of the Harpur-Crewe family. Sir Vauncey Harpur-Crewe's late-nineteenth-century natural history cases—including domed birds, butterflies, and eggs; Egyptian curiosities; a crocodile skull; deer heads; and fossils—are still on display in period rooms that have been restored by the National Trust, which has owned the property since 1985. I toured Calke Abbey with the exceptionally knowledgeable Pat Morris. For those unable to visit, the National Trust's guidebook (1989) provides an excellent virtual tour.

  For information about El Negro, see "Gaborone Journal; Africa Rejoices as a Wandering Soul Finds Rest" by Rachel L. Swarns, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/06/world/gaborone-journal-africa-rejoices-as-a-wandering-soul-finds-rest.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. This article appeared in the New York Times on October 6, 2000.

  I discovered the wonderful word "anthropomorphophobic" in The Postmodern Animal by Steve Baker.

  Details about Errol Fuller appeared in New Scientist, May 2004; the Vancouver Sun, May 15, 2004; the Guardian, November 13, 1999; the Observer, April 10, 1994; and the Spectator, November 8, 2003.

  Richard Taylor's campaign to save the museum was reported in the Guardian on September 8, 2003. Damien Hirst's efforts to buy Potter's appeared in the Financial Times on September 24, 2003, and in Cornwall's local daily, the Western Morning News, on September 24, 2003, which also reported that Bonhams said it had no record of Hirst's offer. His letter in the Guardian, titled "Mr. Potter, Stuffed Rats and Me," ran on September 23, 2003; see www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2003/sep/23/heritage.

  Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, on the waterfront below the Pike Place Market in Seattle, has human mummies.

  For information about the post-auction legal dispute, see "Strange Case of Damien Hirst and the Stuffed Squirrel Sale," Times (London), December 6, 2007, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article3007o8g.ece. When I asked Bonhams whether the legal dispute had been resolved, the auction house had no comment.

  7. IN-A-GADDA-DA-VIDA

  Facts about Damien Hirst and his artworks, including his quotes, are primarily from On the Way to Work by Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn; Damien Hirst, the exhibition catalog for his show at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, Italy, in 2004; I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now; and Carol Vogel's critiques in the New York Times.

  I read about "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" in Martin Gayford's article "Would You Adam and Eve It?" in the Telegraph Magazine (February 28, 2004). The New York Times ran a piece on the replacement tiger shark on October 1, 2006. The newspaper and magazine reviews of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" were all published in February and March of 2004.

  I read about Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996) and in Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal. Hirst describes how he feels about Bacon in On the Way to Work.

  The New York Times published an article that describes the crucified cows on October 1, 2006; Damien Hirst describes the similar concept in On the Way to Work: "I want to do a cow hacked open like that with its arms open. I'm going to do three, sixteen foot. A whole crucifixion. Can't resist it. Sixteen-foot tanks. Massive. With all cows skinned and peeled apart ... Fantastic."

  8. KEN AND THE IRISH ELK

  The basis for Edmonton's "inferiority complex" is from a discussion I had with my friend Tim Tokarsky, an Edmontonian who studied geophysics. I was also incredibly lucky to find myself seated next to Leah Dolgoy, another spirited Edmontonian, on the flight to Alberta.

  In addition to Ken Walker's encyclopedic knowledge, my primary source for information about Megaloceros giganteus—phylogenetic, historic, and cultural—was the Irish elk chapter in Extinct by Anton Gill and Alex West (Macmillan, 2003). I also used the following articles, essays, and academic papers: "A Lesson from the Old Masters" by Stephen Jay Gould ( Natural History, August 1996); "The Phylogenetic Position of the 'Giant Deer' Megaloceros giganteus" by A. M. Lister, C. J. Edwards, D.A.W. Nock, M. Bunce, I. A. van Pijlen, D. G. Bradley, M. G. Thomas, and I. Barnes ( Nature, December 2005); "Why Antlers Branched Out" by Valerius Geist ( Natural History, April 1994); "Irish Elk Survived After Ice Age Ended" by Sid Perkins ( Science News, November 6, 2004); "DNA Pegs Irish Elk's Nearest Relatives" by Sid Perkins ( Science News, October 1, 2005); "Giants Survived Human Onslaught" by Ross MacPhee ( New Scientist, November 13, 2004); "Survival of the Irish Elk into the Holocene" by Silvia Gonzales, Andrew Kitchener, and Adrian M. Lister (Nature, June 15, 2000); "The Case of the Irish Elk" (www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/artio/irishelk.html, n.d.); "Extinct Giant Deer Survived Ice Age, Study Says" by James Owen (National Geographic News, October 6, 2004); "Extinct Giant Deer's Descendant Found in U.K." (www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/giantdeer, September 4, 2005). I found "The Giant Irish Deer—A Victim of the Ice Age" by Frank Mitchell on the Irish Peatland Conservation Council Web site, www.ipcc.ie/infoirishelk.html; it originally appeared in the Shell Guide to Reading the Irish Landscape (Town House & Country House, 1986).

  Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, was deeply moved by Ireland's peat bogs and mined them for inspiration. I read about this in "The Great Irish Elk: Seamus Heaney's Personal Helicon" by William Pratt (World Literature Today, Spring 1996). In it,
Pratt says, "Heaney had described his own creative process as if it had lain for a while in the earth beside the Great Irish elk: 'I have always listened for poems, they come sometimes like bodies come out of a bog, almost complete, seeming to have been laid down a long time ago, surfacing with a torch of mystery.'"

  I read about the Chauvet cave in Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave, the Oldest Known Paintings in the World by Jean Clottes. "Grotte Chauvet Archeologically Dated" by Dr. Christian Zuchner of the Institute of Prehistory, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, appeared in TRACCE (February 2000). This incredible iconographic study compares seven megaloceros paintings and motifs from different periods and caves in France.

  British anatomist Richard Owen's questions about the skeletal and muscular structure of the Irish elk are from Gould's essay "A Lesson from the Old Masters."

  The alarming rate of extinction is sadly easy to document. The United Nations figure is from "Global Diversity Outlook 2," a paper prepared by the Convention on Biological Diversity (2006). The New York Times article "A Rising Number of Birds at Risk" ran on December 1, 2007. The frightening statistics about China's dwindling mammal species and an account of its last two Yangtze giant soft-shell turtles both come from a particularly affecting article in the New York Times by Jim Yardley called "Then There Were Two: Turtles' Fate Shows Threat to China's Species," which ran on December 5, 2007. On June 12, 2007, the New York Times reported that the last two white rhinos in Zambia had been shot by poachers.

  9. I STUFF A SQUIRREL

  All flawed squirrel anatomy described in this chapter is my fault alone and in no way reflects the squirrel output at Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio. David and Bruce did their best to turn a stuffer into a taxidermist; the rest was my undoing.