{"id":1043968,"date":"2010-05-06T08:16:21","date_gmt":"2010-05-06T08:16:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.immortalitymedicine.tv\/the-taxidermy-of-mr-walter-potter-and-his-museum-of-curiosities-melissa-milgrom\/"},"modified":"2024-08-17T17:09:45","modified_gmt":"2024-08-17T21:09:45","slug":"the-taxidermy-of-mr-walter-potter-and-his-museum-of-curiosities-melissa-milgrom-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/anatomy\/the-taxidermy-of-mr-walter-potter-and-his-museum-of-curiosities-melissa-milgrom-2.php","title":{"rendered":"The Taxidermy of Mr. Walter Potter and his Museum of Curiosities, Melissa Milgrom"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Melissa Milgrom--author of Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy<\/a> and panelist at the recent Congress for Curious People<\/a>--has just published a nice article about that undisputed king of Victorian anthropomorhic taxidermy, animal artist and museologoist Walter Potter; following is a brief excerpt:<\/p>

Athletic toads? Rats gambling in a dollhouse of decadence? How about bespectacled gentlemen lobsters?<\/p>

No, this isn’t Wes Anderson’s sequel to Fantastic Mr. Fox, but the work of English Victorian taxidermist Mr. Walter Potter. Potter was famous for his over-the-top anthropomorphic scenes—kittens at the tea table; guinea pigs playing cricket—which were displayed in his Museum of Curiosities from 1861 until 2003 when his wondrous collection was sold in a contentious auction, which I attended in Cornwall.<\/p>

One of England’s oldest private museums, Potter’s belonged to the era of the amateur nature lover when museums were spirited jumbles, not the sober typologies they would become post-Darwin. Potter’s verged on the freakish: random, cluttered, crammed to the rafters with curios and oddities, weird accumulations and creatures that were stuffed, pickled, dissected, and deformed. And I was lucky, though it filled me with sadness, to wander through Potter’s crooked corridors on its very last day...<\/p>

Had Potter attended the Great Expo (very likely) he would have seen among the taxidermy displays a comic depiction of Goethe’s fable Reinecke the Fox reenacted with semi-human foxes. Sounds childlike—and it was in the best, most passionate way—but in the days before irony anthropomorphism was a form of endearment (imagine Beatrix Potter, no relation). More so, the facial expressions were expertly manipulated, raising the taxidermic bar and inspiring followers.<\/p>

Known as the Grotesque School, “mirth-provoking” characters were the equivalent of a blockbuster movie. Queen Victoria herself stopped to linger and laugh at a frog shaving another frog. And taxidermists began transforming all sorts of animals into tiny humans: crows playing violin, frogs doing the cancan, squirrels as Romeo. None were as ambitious as Mr. Walker Potter...<\/p><\/blockquote>

You can read the full article on the Wonders and Marvels blog by clicking here<\/a>. You can find out more about Milgrom's Still Life<\/span>--which contains a nice discussion of Potter and his work--<\/span>by clicking here<\/a>. If the life and work of Walter Potter is of interest, I also highly highly<\/span> recommend that you check out the wonderful, lavishly-illustrated Walter Potter and his Museum of Curious Taxidermy<\/span>, written by<\/span> Congress for Curious People lecturer Pat Morris<\/a>; you can do so by clicking here<\/a> or by visiting Observatory (more on that here<\/a>).<\/p>

All images are of Walter Potter's work and are drawn from the wonderful Ravishing Beasts blog; you can see them in context by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>

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Melissa Milgrom--author of Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy and panelist at the recent Congress for Curious People--has just published a nice article about that undisputed king of Victorian anthropomorhic taxidermy, animal artist and museologoist Walter Potter; following is a brief … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[577281],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1043968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anatomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043968"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1043968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1043968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1043968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1043968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1043968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}