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

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