Abstract
MR. POTTER'S MUSEUM OF CURIOSITIESwas a small Victorian museum that contained unique anthropomorphic tableaux made by the taxidermist Walter Potter (1835–1918). Its glass cases were crammed with small “stuffed” or “mounted” animals, such as birds, squirrels, rats, weasels, and rabbits, wearing miniature clothes and placed in models of the human settings of Potter's time. They play sports, get married, fill schoolrooms and clubs, but they also illustrate well known sayings, rhymes, and rural myths. From the 1860s the tableaux were displayed in Bramber, Sussex, in the southeast of England. In 1972 the Museum was sold and relocated to Brighton and two years later to Arundel, in Sussex. In 1985 it was sold again and moved to the Jamaica Inn – a Daphne du Maurier inspired tourist attraction on the edge of the bleak Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. The collection was finally dispersed in an auction sale in 2003. This sale attracted some media attention and several campaigns attempted to preserve the museum intact. The artist Damien Hirst claimed he had offered to buy the entire collection, but the auction went ahead (Hirst). Hirst was perhaps only the most high profile of those campaigning to keep Potter's collection together. Nevertheless, at the time it seemed hardly surprising that this unusual museum stood more chance of being rescued by an artist whose work often uses animal corpses to speak of mortality and the processes of preservation and decay, than it did of being bought by any public museum.
Highlights
Like the dioramas in natural history museums, are in-situ displays, which construct a small contextual world around the animals represented
The work of the three taxidermists I discuss here clearly develops out of some of the contexts in which taxidermy had long been employed by Europeans: as a museum practice in Plouquet’s case, as a trophy practice linked to rural hunting and farming in Potter’s case, and in the collecting of explorer-naturalists in Waterton’s case
In Potter’s anthropomorphism, species are not consistently associated with specific character types as they are in the anthropomorphic tradition which Ploucquet draws on, and which we find in the fable
Summary
Like the dioramas in natural history museums, are in-situ displays, which construct a small contextual world around the animals represented. Anthropomorphic taxidermy became popular in Britain after Hermann Ploucquet’s animal tableaux were successfully exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
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