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

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