Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

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 heel 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