November 27, 2021 • 38 mins
This 2013 episode covers the taxidermist Potter, who had preserved and mounted 98 birds by the time he was 19. In 1880, his work had grown to a point where it had to be moved to a building, which became his museum. Potter's museum collection continues to enthrall collectors and enthusiasts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since Walter Potter's taxidermy tableau of the death
and burial of cock Robin made an appearance in the
show this week, we thought we would share our episode
on him for Today's Saturday Classic. This episode originally came
out on February and it came out when we were
transitioning onto the show as host, So it is hosted
(00:23):
by me and previous host Sarah Dowdy. And just as
a heads up in case it is not obvious from
the mention of taxidermy, this episode includes various references to
the deaths of small animals. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
(00:49):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Sarah Dowdy. And do you know is Sarah? Do you
recall your first exposure to our topic today, taxidermy? Well,
I was going to save this story a little bit,
but I'm gonna bring it out now. I was telling
it to you already this morning. I'm pretty sure at
(01:13):
the Atlanta's Capital, Georgia State Capital here in Atlanta, lovely building,
gold Dome. Anybody who's been to Atlanta has probably noticed it.
Driven it. If you grow up in Atlanta, you go
there on many a field trip. And the most memorable
memorable part, at least for me and for I think
(01:34):
most of my classmates, was not the trips to the
you know, see the legislators or any of that. What
was excited about government in action. It was the museum,
the Little Capital Museum, which featured lots of strange Georgia history,
but also, most memorably, a two headed calf, a two
(01:57):
headed snake. Welcome to Georgia is And I said this
to you this morning. But I went there sort of
on a whim just a few years ago, so as
an adult, and I noticed that those two items were
not as prominently displayed as they used to be. They
almost seemed to be displayed just as like a nod.
We know people really liked these. We have to keep
(02:20):
them out, but they're kind of weird and maybe don't
exactly belong in the state capital. Yeah, so that's my answer,
that's my Those are the first clear memories of taxidermia.
I would have been familial because I both of my
parents are from farm families that hunted, so I know
there were some deer head and I vaguely remember being
(02:41):
at my grandparents house and being barely transfixed by one
particular buck that I had that simultaneously, oh, this is
really neat and interesting and oh, dear, he was just
looking for a meal when you shot families, Dad. Yeah,
but I do remember being fascinated and like questioning my
father relentlessly about how did they Why? Who thought this
(03:04):
was a good idea? What do you they just how?
Like I was completely simultaneously horrified and just fascinated, like
why does this exist? Yeah? Why did we do it?
And then later in my life I was exposed to
the work of the text ermist we're talking about today,
who anyone who is into taxidermy I am confident will
(03:26):
know this person the second we say his name, and
it is Walter Potter. And I got exposed to his
work when I was working in the library and a
book that featured one of his pieces came across my
desk and I remember looking at it and then looking
at it again, and looking at it about seventeen more
times in the next twelve minutes. And somebody really put
this together, uh, because he did these amazing, wondrously bizarre
(03:50):
tableau with animals and this is where people do need
to stop for a minute and if you're on your run, okay,
we'll come back to its. Well, describe a few things,
but are going to want the visuals for yourself. Up
this stuff for sure, and that it makes you wish
that it was a video podcast at a time like this.
But check out these because well to describe them, but
(04:13):
you really need the pictures. And there's some great pictures
fortunately to like modern color pictures. And we'll talk about
kind of where his work is now, um, like where
the physical works exist now, um. But we'll start at
the beginning. So he was born in Sussex, um in
(04:34):
five and he worked at his family's in which was
called the White Lion now it's called the Castle and
it's in Bramber And I have never I've read several
biographical accounts about him, no one ever really talks about
his early childhood. I presume it was probably pretty standard
and kids stuff, you know, kids stuff, working in the
family um in. But then at approximately aged fifteen, he
(04:58):
I'm pres zooming because no one ever spelled this out either.
I'm presuming his pet canary passed before he had the
idea to preserve it um Let's hope. So yeah, it
was a memento almost. Yeah, And this was at a
time when preserving your pets was starting to become more
popular anyway, So it was not necessarily a thing an
(05:22):
idea he would have just magically had on his own.
He may have seen something about it or read something
about it. Not the sign of a disturbed teenage boy,
a normal thing to do. No, he didn't do it
that well though. No, Apparently that first effort was not
so hot, which anytime someone's learning a new craft or trade,
usually the first go is not going to be a masterpiece.
(05:45):
There has been some discussion, but there's never been any
corroboration that he might have been influenced by an exhibit
that was at the Great Exhibition in London, in one
by Ermann Pluquet, And anyone feel free to correct me
if I mispronounced that. But he had an exhibit that
was small Animal Taxidermy UM, and it was UM basically
(06:07):
the story of Renicky the Fox, which is based on
the Wilhelm von Kalbach etchings of Geta's medieval trickster tale.
So it's kind of like a uh, it's these if
you've never seen that one. It's these hilarious little rodents
that are acting out these adventures, and they're kind of
like two. It's like a pair that are doing one
(06:28):
activity after another, like almost like a comic strip animal tableau. Yeah,
so it's not one big tableau that tells the story.
It's it's laid out like sequential art. But I like
the idea that he would have been inspired by the
Great Exhibition. To so many of the subjects we've discussed
in the past, including Deablina's last episode, there was some
toilet inspiration that came from the Great Exhibition. It's an
(06:50):
exciting time in London. It is this sort of cultural
point where where all people are exposed to new things
for the first time. And it certainly seems plausible that
this young boy from a country village would come across
something that he found really magical at the Great Exhibition. Well,
(07:11):
and even like I said, there have not been any
corroborative writings that say definitively yes, he was there, But
the Great Exhibition was so big that people were talking
about the things that they had seen, and it traveled
even if he had been worth so uh so, yeah,
he did his Canary and there's a great um quote
(07:33):
that he gave, apparently in he did a correspondence interview
with the Idler magazine and he says, well, after I've
done my canary, people encouraged me to persevere. If they
saw any bird or animal they thought I would like,
they'd bring it or send it to me. So he
was practicing throughout these years after he was fifteen, because
he did take a shine to this craft, and then
(07:55):
he got the idea that he could put them together
in big works of arts. And that's kind of the
turning point here, not just melting an animal and displaying
it uniquely creating some scene with it. Yeah. It really
became almost like a painter with a paintbrush. He would
create entire vistas and stories using mounted animals. UM. And
(08:18):
the first big one is the History of cock Robin,
which uh he used ninety eight birds. I believe that
he had been working on through the years, and this
is when he was nineteen. He had gotten all of
those together and he worked on the history of the
original death and burial. I'm sorry it wasn't The history
(08:39):
UM is the original death and Burial of cock Robin.
And he worked on this for years and years. But
it basically was a big funeral procession for cock Robin,
including the I believe it was a sparrow that had
shot him with an arrow with my arrow. Yeah, and
there was an owl grave digger, and you know the
(08:59):
grave is the or there are other animals there to
pay their respects. It's like a big story, yeah, inspired
by the nursery rhyme to where all of the birds
are picking their roles the role they will perform during
cock Robin's funeral. Um. And and that's the other major
(09:21):
difference here, So putting the animals together in a tableau,
but not in an animal like way. It's not a
natural history museum setting. It's a human like setting. Yeah,
these aren't. Later on he starts to add even more
human accessories to it. These aren't like clothed yet there
(09:41):
are a couple with ribbons around their necks. Um. And
the owl clearly is holding a little little shovel where
that he's digging the grave with. But yeah, this is
really you know, as Sariou said the verse time, that
it was mounted animals doing human things, almost like you
would see in like a children's book or a cartoon. Yeah,
that that nurse reevime inspiration is very apparent, and it
(10:04):
carries through his work pretty much his entire life. Uh.
So at that point, as his work started to expand,
they had to expand his work area. So he first
moved into a barn loft at his family's house. Uh.
And then once he started creating these big works, they
went on display at the end. Uh. And there have
(10:27):
been different accounts of where they went on display and
what the purpose was. And I think it's kind of
a case of revisionist history. Uh. It sounds like his
parents were very encouraging of his work because I'm sure
they saw it as a potential career. Um. And he
says in that same interview with the Idler that his
(10:47):
father um eventually built does he call it a key shed?
I think behind the end where he could put his
his big work on display. And of course then his
work continued to grow and growing. Lenny describes the little
girls about his age, you know, teenage girls coming to
to see the see his work for the first time
(11:10):
and leaving some coins behind and starting to get that idea,
oh wait, maybe I can make money. Yeah, that's where
he got his idea for a museum. Well, and as
you were mentioning too, with other accounts you see of this.
I mean, some are saying it was a direct marketing strategy,
that his parents were like, come and see the inn
(11:31):
where we have have a pint animal check out of
the death of cock Robin. Yeah, exactly, But others are
more like, oh, it kind of happened accidentally. I can
I can see it either way. I mean we were
saying earlier, I think I would go slightly out of
my way to visit an inn or a pub that
had these strange scenes, especially since they were pretty trendy
(11:53):
at the time, or just you know, you happen upon them.
It has nothing to do with marketing the pub. So eventually,
UM in eighteen sixty six he moved his workshop to
a new spot because the stable loft was not containing
his situation anymore, and then again in eighteen eighty he
moved into a specially built building which eventually became his museum.
(12:15):
And that museum wasn't only for his work. He also
collected curiosities from other places UM including like a lot
of it was natural history type items like horns and teeth.
There were skulls, and he had some human artifacts like
his shoes and jewelry. Uh, just sort of a random
collection hodgepodge of things. This part of the story reminded
(12:37):
me so much of P. T. Barnum's story and the
the era before him of of natural history museums, I guess,
the birth of natural history museums and going from these
collections curios, just a strange hodgepodge of things, some valuable,
some just old teeth or horns or what not, all
(13:02):
brought together, and and the fad for for seeing those
at the time. Yeah, I mean, people were very fascinated
by this idea of just looking at things from other
people's lives or other animals that they maybe hadn't been
exposed to in their natural, day to day life. Um.
That it was, as you said, like this was really
(13:23):
when the idea of the natural history museum was starting
to kind of boom and grow and um, the Natural
History Museum and the freak Show Museum, and it was
all kind of very different. People were looking for entertainment
in a variety of ways at the same time. Um.
And he did start taking on work as um a taxidermist,
(13:46):
like on demand for people like he would preserve their
pets for them. UM. It was very starting to get
very popular for people to keep mounted animals in their parlors. UM.
Some would be like their personal family pet, but some
also collected like exotic birds. Apparently, UM, Queen Victoria had
some exotic birds, which is the thing I had not
(14:07):
known until we were digging in on research for this. UM.
So he would do all of that, but really he
always wanted to continue creating these tableau And a question
that always comes up whenever you're talking about Walter Potter
(14:28):
with people is where was he getting these animals? Does
he starts seeing tableau with twenty kittens and them will
cross your mind? Yeah. So apparently he mentioned in that
that interview that I scited earlier that people would bring
him what they thought were interesting specimens. But he also
kind of had a deal going on with local farmers.
(14:49):
And this is where our modern pet loving brain has
to kind of close down and be put aside for
a little while, because I have a hard time with
this being like a crazy animal person. UM. You know,
on farms, they don't with span neuter their pets and
cats are there to work, they're there to keep vermin
at bay. But because they are animals that have not
been fixed, they are having lots of babies, and often
(15:09):
way more than really can be sustained by what the
rodent population on the farm is, so farmers would bring
him unwanted kittens. I have not really found a clear
indicator as to whether they were already deceased when they
got to Mr Potter or if he took care of
that um. But I do know, like I said, I
grew up with some farm family background. For you know,
(15:33):
people that grow up in that, it's often not and
especially at this period of time, it wasn't like you
went to the vet and had animals euthanized. You kind
of learned to do the dirty work and make the
hard decision of taking care of situations like that. Well,
and and the history of the animals seemed to become
kind of an issue too in the nineteen seventies, with
the museum and visitors concerned that it was cruelty to animals,
(15:56):
so much so that museum had to put up a
little placard saying, for one thing, these are over a
hundred years old, and also don't worry, no animals were
specifically killed for the project, which they know if they
would have been done away with one way or the other.
This way, they just went on to become part of art.
(16:18):
Still though troubling it is. I mean, I, as I said,
I have to kind of put away my my animal
loving brain for a moment and just think about, you know,
the time period and how animals. You know, we're seeing
more as livestock at that point. It wasn't like their
cuddly pet. It was they were working creatures. But also
(16:38):
people would bring him, um, unfortunate specimens that had maybe
not lived very long because they were not healthy. Maybe
once more in line with my two headed snake to
experience um we mentioned earlier. You can find all manner
of images of these things if you look, and some
(16:59):
of them, some of the more malformed ones there. It's
like the kitten with eight legs and two tails, which
is what it's called. It's very basic, um kitten with
eight legs and yeah, kitten with eight legs and two tails.
There's one that has There are a couple who have
like two faces. There are um, you know, there's so
(17:19):
he did those kind of out of fascination, and I
think he was probably studying anatomy at the same time,
you know, what I mean, it was giving him some
clues into how the differences between right and wrong create
the structure properly. But then he was also doing really
artistic works like the Village School, which is a bunch
of tiny bunnies with little chalkboards and they have little desks,
(17:42):
and he would craft all of their accessories as well,
so they're tiny little lesson books. All of that was handmade. Um.
The Guinea Pigs cricket match, that one has always cracked
me up. There is a full Guinea pig band with
brass multi piece. Yeah. There they are full and ready
to play orchestral pieces. There's a pavilion and then there
(18:05):
are the guinea pigs who are getting ready for their
cricket match. And another thing to point out about these
tableau two is they all have these beautifully soft painted
background which seemed so striking against the by this point
kind of dusty Victorian animals. Um, but they add to
that nursery rhyme fairytale quality was trying to go for.
(18:27):
For sure. There's one really odd one that is a
When we first started talking about doing this episode, I
was like, Sarah, you have to see this picture, and
it's a monkey riding a goat, and I don't know why.
Every time I look at it it makes me kind
of chuckle because the expression of the monkey's face is funny.
The whole setup is funny. The proportion of it is
just perfectly hilarious. That one seemed so reminiscent of Barnum
(18:53):
to me because you know, and you can give this
to Potter too, who was not trying to um pull
one over on his audience. It was, you know, this
is a this is a kitten who was born with
two heads or whatnot. He wasn't trying to create creatures
that didn't exist. He was riding in the goat. Was nature?
(19:15):
Just a strange decision to combine two animals into into
one scene like this, and then the big one that um,
I think for people that are fans of his work,
and it is very striking. There's one called The Kitten's Wedding,
and it is a full wedding party comprised of kittens
(19:36):
in full gown, elaborate dresses and jewelry and little suits.
It's it's fascinating and bizarre and there's a grotesque element
to it, but it's also one of those things where
I can't help but think like about the hours of meticulous,
exacting labor that goes into something like this. I mean,
(19:58):
he made teeny tiny austin just to put on each
of them, and they're all quaffed like their hair is
done there. It's it's really quite fascinating to think about
how much just he must have been in love with
his art, because he really did seem to just dedicate
his heart and soul to it. It's easy to focus
solely on the mounts though, and and not look at
(20:22):
not look at the kittens dresses, but look at their face.
Looks quite right, you know. I think, um probably the
goal of many taxidermists today. And we've heard from we
have listeners to who have written in to tell us
about their work. Um, tell us that it's not stuffing,
it's mounting. UM. I think maybe of the modern goal
(20:44):
of taxidermy is to look as though the animal wants alive,
to have the idea of capturing a natural moment, a
living quality about them. And you certainly cannot say that
about Potter's work. And I don't think that was the goal,
but his taxidermy skills wouldn't have allowed that anyway. I
(21:05):
mean the kittens don't have they don't look like they
were ever alive. No, they look like dolls. They really
do have a doll like quality by the time he
has done humanizing them, you know, antropomorphizing them with outfits
and accessories and just concepts that they would not be
put into. Like you know, very few kittens get invited
to weddings in my experience, but so m once in
(21:28):
a while it happens. Um. But yeah, it's not it's
not trying to capture that moment of the animal in
the wild. Some of his um malformed creatures are more
intended to look like their life like state. Um. But
these ones, once he gets into tableau, it's really about
creating something entirely new. Some of the life like quality,
(21:52):
or lack thereof two comes from his skill mounting to
I mean, things didn't always go quite as land, especially
for more exotic animals. Yeah, because he didn't have practice.
He didn't get to practice with them. He got pretty
good at kittens and apparently was very good with birds.
But there is allegedly a baby giraffe that he attempted
(22:14):
that I could never find a photo for that just
didn't come out quite right, um, and then the lion
that looks like it's wearing saggy pantyhose because his the
skin on the legs. You know, it's with any anyone
who's been around a cat, you know that the skin
has some flexibility. But he didn't quite get where it is. Yeah,
(22:35):
it looks and just the stance of the lion too.
It's one of those where Okay, maybe he didn't ever
see a living lion. Maybe he didn't have that opportunity
because the lion doesn't stand quite like that. Yeah, it
looks just off. I mean, you can recognize it as
a lion. There is a certain you know, it's a lion,
(22:56):
so there's a certain natural majesty to it. But you
just something's not quite right. And that reminds me of
of old engravings of descript you know, explorers who have
described animals and then they're illustrated by engravers back in Europe,
and these are African animals or North American animals, and
(23:17):
the illustrator has never seen them, and they're trying to
imagine what the animal looks like. Yeah, it's just not
quite right. A plus effort um, and he continued to
mount his entire life, and then in nineteen fourteen he
suffered a stroke and he never really fully recovered. And
(23:37):
he was I believe seventy nine at the time, so
it wasn't like he was struck down as a very
young man. Um But then in nineteen eighteen he passed
away and he had spent his whole life there in Sussex.
Basically he was buried in the village churchyard um and
his museum was left to his daughter, Minnie Collins and
his grandson alternate also named Walter, but his last was
(24:00):
Collins Uh and they were the curators of the museum
until the nineteen seventies and they basically got to a
point where, you know, they just couldn't handle it anymore.
It was too much work. I mean, that's a lot
to keep going, and so um it got moved first
to Arundel and then in the nineteen eighties it went
(24:23):
to the Jamaica Inn in Cornwall. There was a moment
in the middle where it was almost going to be
shipped off to America because I think that first stopping
point also didn't quite know what to do with it
and didn't have the resources to keep it in good
condition and then the Jamaica in stepped in and said
no, no no, we will take it. So those people hung
onto it until two thousand three and they decided to
(24:47):
liquidate the collection because their curator had died or had
retired rather i'm sorry, and their taxidermists had passed away.
He had leukemia, and they who had maintained all of
these fascinates too. And and it's like to thousand specimens
by that point. And it would be a lot of
work too. It's not something that you can just put
in a case and then forgot about. No, it needs
(25:08):
constant care and maintenance, especially you know as it gets older,
it is more and more work. You sent me a
video from the nineteen sixties where there's a man who
is tending to some of the specimens, I think to
a cow in one of the pictures, which is he
didn't preserve a life size cow, it's a it with
(25:32):
cap skin. But the curator is carefully dusting and cleaning
and then returns the cow to the tableau. It would
be a tremendous amount of work. And also I can
see why the museums would be facing problems in this
time too, because this is kind of kitchy. At this point.
(25:53):
It was very popular in the Victorian era to go
look at mounted animals and they found it quite charming.
There was a growing um sense of unrest at it,
like there wasn't the same Oh that's magical and charming.
It was they saw more of the grotesque than the
charm at that kind of the cob And like we
mentioned earlier, the questions about wait a minute, is this
(26:16):
humane or not? They were all killed a hundred years ago. Yeah,
certain changing tastes played a role in this. Yeah. So,
and it was a Mr. And Mrs Watts that owned
(26:38):
the collection at this point. So in two thousand three
they decided that they would sell the collection, and they
were hoping that someone would buy the whole thing in
one shot and maintain the museum, because even though it
had shifted and was not in the original museum, they
still considered it the museum um And unfortunately that did
not happen. I mean, there were many attempts made. There
(27:00):
was even a landowner nearby that was offering a parcel
for free and saying, you can build a new museum
here if you can keep the collection together. But they
still needed capital to do all of that, and it
never came through, and it it's pretty interesting did numbers
when you look at the prices some of these pieces fetched.
And then we'll come back to sort of some other
(27:20):
things that developed or came to light after the fact.
There was a little bit of scandal, and there were,
as I said, there were lots of people trying to
get together the money to put this thing, to keep
it together and to buy the whole collection outright, but
they just never there was never enough and so eventually,
(27:40):
for example the death and burial of Cock Robin, the
original estimate for what I was going to go for
was ten thousand dollars, and I think it actually went
four twenty five hundred British pounds, which is about thirty
three thousand dollars US at the time of the sale.
And that was the high high mark for for the works,
(28:03):
but a lot of them Kitten's Wedding actually it was
a little bit more. A little more, Yeah, that was
thirty five thousand dollars, but a lot of them were
pulling in in the in the twenties. UM eleven thousand,
ten thousand, Monkey Monkey Riding a Goat brought in eleven thousand,
six hundred dollars, which I think is a bargain, But
(28:25):
I mean there really were even though this is years
and years later. I mean this is in the two thousand's,
there were enough people that knew about his work that
were very excited to go. And you can read some
accounts online of people that were like, Okay, I have
you know, I'm throwing out a random number, like ten
thousand dollars. I'm gonna get whatever I can because I
really want a piece of Walter Potter's legacy. Okay. So
(28:47):
the crazy thing is, though, even though these works went
for way more than expected and ultimately pulled in around
five nine thousand, nine hundred pounds, which is you said,
was twice what they had predicted, the scandal came because
there had apparently been an offer to keep the collection together,
(29:09):
and that offer had been for way more than that
collective price a million pounds, right, and that was from
an artist, a British artist named Damien Hurst. Uh, and
he really wanted it. I mean, he's a fan of
Walter Potter, he knew about his work. He's best known
(29:30):
to by the way, for the shark Suspended tank. When
it came to light that he had actually made an
offer to Bottoms, which was the auction house that handled
the sale. The Watts were actually really upset because they
had never been informed of this offer. As of two
thousand seven, they were threatening to sue Bottom's for not
accepting that offer and for not informing them, because they
(29:52):
were supposed to have notified them if they received any
serious offer to keep the collection intact, and let alone
one that was is so high above what actually Yeah,
so they were planning to sue both for monetary damages
for half a million pounds. But also they really did.
I mean, these are people that actually tended this collection
(30:13):
for years. It's not like they just were trying to
turn it and make a buck. You know. They clearly
cared about it and wanted it to go in one
big set, not piecemeal. It ended up in different lots
and which is I'm sure heartbreaking to people that had
tended to it very lovingly for you know, decades at
that point. So as it stands, Mr Watts has taken
(30:35):
it to court and he said, we have tried to
discuss this amicably, but with no joy. They leave us
with no option to but to pursue our complaint in
the Court, so that seems to be ongoing. It was
no recent update on it, Yeah, I didn't see one,
but there is a different recent update there is, and
the collection is coming together again, although well it did
(30:58):
briefly UM in twenty ten um Damien Hurst again and
he did buy some of the lots. Was basically kind
of using his connections in the art world to try
to put this together in the Museum of Everything, which
is a pop up museum in Primrose Hill in London,
which I apparently used to be a Victoria It was
(31:18):
a dairy and Victorian era and then it became a
recording studio get acoustics, and then it was at least
for this time, a pop up museum space. And so
he actually did get together a lot of the pieces,
even some that had been sold to collectors overseas. I
know there were some pieces that were here in the
US that were being shipped over for the collection. And
(31:40):
it ran until the end of at least I don't
know if any portion of it continued UM as an exhibit,
but I have a feeling this is probably not the
last time we will see people try to put this together,
because it's odd how lovingly people look at this collection
and there's just something about it that it it makes
(32:03):
you want to like pull for it to all come
back together. It does, I mean, I was it's interesting
to look at these and it is such a i
don't know, a strange slice of Victorian life, but the
fascination that people have with it, even though this is
clearly not in style today, it is interesting. And that
(32:26):
there are these people who are investing great deals of
money in it too, to try to reunite these pieces
and bring them all back together. Yeah, it's I mean
when you read accounts of people that were trying to
save it during the two thousand three auction, I mean
there's really like a sense a tone of just dismay
(32:48):
and heart heart break that it's, you know, a pity
they think it's a national treasure. Why isn't you know,
some big institution stepping in and making sure that this
you know, full color action museum doesn't get preserved as
it is. And I wonder to how much of that
comes into nostalgia too, If if this museum was a
favorite place for generations of kids to visit, you know,
(33:13):
through through the seventies certainly, but beyond too, and the
Watts were maintaining it. Um just like I would be
sad if the capital finally put away their two headed snake.
Don't let me know if you work there and it's
gone now. UM I wonder if if people feel that
way too, that this is something um strangely British and
(33:33):
and worth maintaining and celebrating. It's also there's such a
sweetness to the story that it was just basically a
simple kid in the country who had a love for
a thing and that was the only thing he really
did his whole life. I mean, he married, he had
several children, but it was his life's work, was his museum,
in his taxidermy, and you know, mounting animals in new
(33:54):
and creative and artistic ways that no one had ever
thought to do before. There's just you want to cheer
for those people, so you know, you want to maintain
what's left of their work when they're gone, and that
he did have success in his life too, even if
the collection is now going through hard times being split up.
But um, I thought one of the most interesting points
(34:16):
was that at one point the museum was so popular
that they had to extend the railway platform in town
to accommodate the people that were just visitors coming coming
out to visit, coming to see a kitten wedding. They
got an invite to the kitten wedding. They brought their gifts,
they're ready to be fabulous guests and have a good time.
(34:38):
So hopefully we'll see more stories about the Potter collection,
and I would love to see it myself at some point.
That's like one of my bucket list items is to
see at least some decent chunks of the Potter call.
It sounds like kitten wedding is possibly in the States too,
if if because Damien Hurst had had trouble getting to
the collection, they mentioned it was somewhere, but I don't
(34:59):
know if it's in a in a private collection in
somebody's house. This story made me sort of more interested
too in just the history of taxidermy too, and um,
you know how it got to this extremely decorative point
in the late Victorian era, but it's earlier roots too.
(35:21):
And and also I couldn't help but thinking of the
health issues to working with the chemicals. I mean, he
lives to a rifled age. It obviously doesn't seem to
have affected his health, but arsenic there's a lot of
a lot of sludge and gross chemicals that are not
kind to the the body. Um. Yeah, and it's funny
(35:45):
too because we love these things so much. But I
the idea of preserving a beloved pet has certainly fallen
out of favor. I mean, I know there are people
that still do it from time to time, but they're
definitely outliers of like the pet parents and community. I
know fewer people. I don't know any personally. I don't
think that's done that, um, but I know people do it.
(36:07):
So it is kind of a it's an interesting lens
that we can kind of flare out where we really
love this, but we would be a little creeped out
by our own you know, animals being part of something
like that. Well, in that game preservation is still a
totally mainstream Yeah. Suit, I'm suddenly having a flash to
(36:28):
the Field Museum in Chicago. Have you ever been a
huge taxidermy collection? I have not. I thought of the
Biltmore House, the h in there, the Gentleman's Room essentially, Uh,
there is a huge collection of of games. Yeah, if
(36:49):
anyone is in Chicago or is visiting Chicago, go to
the Field and I mean, it's it blows you away
just how many specimens they have on display. They even
have the Ghost in the Darkness, the lions that were
murderous um that there was a movie about them there
on display there. I mean, it's just walking through Museum Hall,
aftrom Museum Hall of Mounted Animals. It's kind of fascinating.
(37:13):
I'm sure we're going to hear from our I hope.
I bet they can give us all manner of insights
that you don't always get when you're doing regular research.
There are things that you learn from the inside of
any trade that you would not normally learn when you're
reading about it or studying about it. So I look
forward to those Pay so much for joining us on
(37:36):
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar over the course of the show,
that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is
History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old
health stuff works email address no longer works, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in History.
(37:59):
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from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. Since Walter Potter's taxidermy tableau of the death
and burial of cock Robin made an appearance in the
show this week, we thought we would share our episode
on him for Today's Saturday Classic. This episode originally came
out on February and it came out when we were
transitioning onto the show as host, So it is hosted
(00:23):
by me and previous host Sarah Dowdy. And just as
a heads up in case it is not obvious from
the mention of taxidermy, this episode includes various references to
the deaths of small animals. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
(00:49):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Sarah Dowdy. And do you know is Sarah? Do you
recall your first exposure to our topic today, taxidermy? Well,
I was going to save this story a little bit,
but I'm gonna bring it out now. I was telling
it to you already this morning. I'm pretty sure at
(01:13):
the Atlanta's Capital, Georgia State Capital here in Atlanta, lovely building,
gold Dome. Anybody who's been to Atlanta has probably noticed it.
Driven it. If you grow up in Atlanta, you go
there on many a field trip. And the most memorable
memorable part, at least for me and for I think
(01:34):
most of my classmates, was not the trips to the
you know, see the legislators or any of that. What
was excited about government in action. It was the museum,
the Little Capital Museum, which featured lots of strange Georgia history,
but also, most memorably, a two headed calf, a two
(01:57):
headed snake. Welcome to Georgia is And I said this
to you this morning. But I went there sort of
on a whim just a few years ago, so as
an adult, and I noticed that those two items were
not as prominently displayed as they used to be. They
almost seemed to be displayed just as like a nod.
We know people really liked these. We have to keep
(02:20):
them out, but they're kind of weird and maybe don't
exactly belong in the state capital. Yeah, so that's my answer,
that's my Those are the first clear memories of taxidermia.
I would have been familial because I both of my
parents are from farm families that hunted, so I know
there were some deer head and I vaguely remember being
(02:41):
at my grandparents house and being barely transfixed by one
particular buck that I had that simultaneously, oh, this is
really neat and interesting and oh, dear, he was just
looking for a meal when you shot families, Dad. Yeah,
but I do remember being fascinated and like questioning my
father relentlessly about how did they Why? Who thought this
(03:04):
was a good idea? What do you they just how?
Like I was completely simultaneously horrified and just fascinated, like
why does this exist? Yeah? Why did we do it?
And then later in my life I was exposed to
the work of the text ermist we're talking about today,
who anyone who is into taxidermy I am confident will
(03:26):
know this person the second we say his name, and
it is Walter Potter. And I got exposed to his
work when I was working in the library and a
book that featured one of his pieces came across my
desk and I remember looking at it and then looking
at it again, and looking at it about seventeen more
times in the next twelve minutes. And somebody really put
this together, uh, because he did these amazing, wondrously bizarre
(03:50):
tableau with animals and this is where people do need
to stop for a minute and if you're on your run, okay,
we'll come back to its. Well, describe a few things,
but are going to want the visuals for yourself. Up
this stuff for sure, and that it makes you wish
that it was a video podcast at a time like this.
But check out these because well to describe them, but
(04:13):
you really need the pictures. And there's some great pictures
fortunately to like modern color pictures. And we'll talk about
kind of where his work is now, um, like where
the physical works exist now, um. But we'll start at
the beginning. So he was born in Sussex, um in
(04:34):
five and he worked at his family's in which was
called the White Lion now it's called the Castle and
it's in Bramber And I have never I've read several
biographical accounts about him, no one ever really talks about
his early childhood. I presume it was probably pretty standard
and kids stuff, you know, kids stuff, working in the
family um in. But then at approximately aged fifteen, he
(04:58):
I'm pres zooming because no one ever spelled this out either.
I'm presuming his pet canary passed before he had the
idea to preserve it um Let's hope. So yeah, it
was a memento almost. Yeah, And this was at a
time when preserving your pets was starting to become more
popular anyway, So it was not necessarily a thing an
(05:22):
idea he would have just magically had on his own.
He may have seen something about it or read something
about it. Not the sign of a disturbed teenage boy,
a normal thing to do. No, he didn't do it
that well though. No, Apparently that first effort was not
so hot, which anytime someone's learning a new craft or trade,
usually the first go is not going to be a masterpiece.
(05:45):
There has been some discussion, but there's never been any
corroboration that he might have been influenced by an exhibit
that was at the Great Exhibition in London, in one
by Ermann Pluquet, And anyone feel free to correct me
if I mispronounced that. But he had an exhibit that
was small Animal Taxidermy UM, and it was UM basically
(06:07):
the story of Renicky the Fox, which is based on
the Wilhelm von Kalbach etchings of Geta's medieval trickster tale.
So it's kind of like a uh, it's these if
you've never seen that one. It's these hilarious little rodents
that are acting out these adventures, and they're kind of
like two. It's like a pair that are doing one
(06:28):
activity after another, like almost like a comic strip animal tableau. Yeah,
so it's not one big tableau that tells the story.
It's it's laid out like sequential art. But I like
the idea that he would have been inspired by the
Great Exhibition. To so many of the subjects we've discussed
in the past, including Deablina's last episode, there was some
toilet inspiration that came from the Great Exhibition. It's an
(06:50):
exciting time in London. It is this sort of cultural
point where where all people are exposed to new things
for the first time. And it certainly seems plausible that
this young boy from a country village would come across
something that he found really magical at the Great Exhibition. Well,
(07:11):
and even like I said, there have not been any
corroborative writings that say definitively yes, he was there, But
the Great Exhibition was so big that people were talking
about the things that they had seen, and it traveled
even if he had been worth so uh so, yeah,
he did his Canary and there's a great um quote
(07:33):
that he gave, apparently in he did a correspondence interview
with the Idler magazine and he says, well, after I've
done my canary, people encouraged me to persevere. If they
saw any bird or animal they thought I would like,
they'd bring it or send it to me. So he
was practicing throughout these years after he was fifteen, because
he did take a shine to this craft, and then
(07:55):
he got the idea that he could put them together
in big works of arts. And that's kind of the
turning point here, not just melting an animal and displaying
it uniquely creating some scene with it. Yeah. It really
became almost like a painter with a paintbrush. He would
create entire vistas and stories using mounted animals. UM. And
(08:18):
the first big one is the History of cock Robin,
which uh he used ninety eight birds. I believe that
he had been working on through the years, and this
is when he was nineteen. He had gotten all of
those together and he worked on the history of the
original death and burial. I'm sorry it wasn't The history
(08:39):
UM is the original death and Burial of cock Robin.
And he worked on this for years and years. But
it basically was a big funeral procession for cock Robin,
including the I believe it was a sparrow that had
shot him with an arrow with my arrow. Yeah, and
there was an owl grave digger, and you know the
(08:59):
grave is the or there are other animals there to
pay their respects. It's like a big story, yeah, inspired
by the nursery rhyme to where all of the birds
are picking their roles the role they will perform during
cock Robin's funeral. Um. And and that's the other major
(09:21):
difference here, So putting the animals together in a tableau,
but not in an animal like way. It's not a
natural history museum setting. It's a human like setting. Yeah,
these aren't. Later on he starts to add even more
human accessories to it. These aren't like clothed yet there
(09:41):
are a couple with ribbons around their necks. Um. And
the owl clearly is holding a little little shovel where
that he's digging the grave with. But yeah, this is
really you know, as Sariou said the verse time, that
it was mounted animals doing human things, almost like you
would see in like a children's book or a cartoon. Yeah,
that that nurse reevime inspiration is very apparent, and it
(10:04):
carries through his work pretty much his entire life. Uh.
So at that point, as his work started to expand,
they had to expand his work area. So he first
moved into a barn loft at his family's house. Uh.
And then once he started creating these big works, they
went on display at the end. Uh. And there have
(10:27):
been different accounts of where they went on display and
what the purpose was. And I think it's kind of
a case of revisionist history. Uh. It sounds like his
parents were very encouraging of his work because I'm sure
they saw it as a potential career. Um. And he
says in that same interview with the Idler that his
(10:47):
father um eventually built does he call it a key shed?
I think behind the end where he could put his
his big work on display. And of course then his
work continued to grow and growing. Lenny describes the little
girls about his age, you know, teenage girls coming to
to see the see his work for the first time
(11:10):
and leaving some coins behind and starting to get that idea,
oh wait, maybe I can make money. Yeah, that's where
he got his idea for a museum. Well, and as
you were mentioning too, with other accounts you see of this.
I mean, some are saying it was a direct marketing strategy,
that his parents were like, come and see the inn
(11:31):
where we have have a pint animal check out of
the death of cock Robin. Yeah, exactly, But others are
more like, oh, it kind of happened accidentally. I can
I can see it either way. I mean we were
saying earlier, I think I would go slightly out of
my way to visit an inn or a pub that
had these strange scenes, especially since they were pretty trendy
(11:53):
at the time, or just you know, you happen upon them.
It has nothing to do with marketing the pub. So eventually,
UM in eighteen sixty six he moved his workshop to
a new spot because the stable loft was not containing
his situation anymore, and then again in eighteen eighty he
moved into a specially built building which eventually became his museum.
(12:15):
And that museum wasn't only for his work. He also
collected curiosities from other places UM including like a lot
of it was natural history type items like horns and teeth.
There were skulls, and he had some human artifacts like
his shoes and jewelry. Uh, just sort of a random
collection hodgepodge of things. This part of the story reminded
(12:37):
me so much of P. T. Barnum's story and the
the era before him of of natural history museums, I guess,
the birth of natural history museums and going from these
collections curios, just a strange hodgepodge of things, some valuable,
some just old teeth or horns or what not, all
(13:02):
brought together, and and the fad for for seeing those
at the time. Yeah, I mean, people were very fascinated
by this idea of just looking at things from other
people's lives or other animals that they maybe hadn't been
exposed to in their natural, day to day life. Um.
That it was, as you said, like this was really
(13:23):
when the idea of the natural history museum was starting
to kind of boom and grow and um, the Natural
History Museum and the freak Show Museum, and it was
all kind of very different. People were looking for entertainment
in a variety of ways at the same time. Um.
And he did start taking on work as um a taxidermist,
(13:46):
like on demand for people like he would preserve their
pets for them. UM. It was very starting to get
very popular for people to keep mounted animals in their parlors. UM.
Some would be like their personal family pet, but some
also collected like exotic birds. Apparently, UM, Queen Victoria had
some exotic birds, which is the thing I had not
(14:07):
known until we were digging in on research for this. UM.
So he would do all of that, but really he
always wanted to continue creating these tableau And a question
that always comes up whenever you're talking about Walter Potter
(14:28):
with people is where was he getting these animals? Does
he starts seeing tableau with twenty kittens and them will
cross your mind? Yeah. So apparently he mentioned in that
that interview that I scited earlier that people would bring
him what they thought were interesting specimens. But he also
kind of had a deal going on with local farmers.
(14:49):
And this is where our modern pet loving brain has
to kind of close down and be put aside for
a little while, because I have a hard time with
this being like a crazy animal person. UM. You know,
on farms, they don't with span neuter their pets and
cats are there to work, they're there to keep vermin
at bay. But because they are animals that have not
been fixed, they are having lots of babies, and often
(15:09):
way more than really can be sustained by what the
rodent population on the farm is, so farmers would bring
him unwanted kittens. I have not really found a clear
indicator as to whether they were already deceased when they
got to Mr Potter or if he took care of
that um. But I do know, like I said, I
grew up with some farm family background. For you know,
(15:33):
people that grow up in that, it's often not and
especially at this period of time, it wasn't like you
went to the vet and had animals euthanized. You kind
of learned to do the dirty work and make the
hard decision of taking care of situations like that. Well,
and and the history of the animals seemed to become
kind of an issue too in the nineteen seventies, with
the museum and visitors concerned that it was cruelty to animals,
(15:56):
so much so that museum had to put up a
little placard saying, for one thing, these are over a
hundred years old, and also don't worry, no animals were
specifically killed for the project, which they know if they
would have been done away with one way or the other.
This way, they just went on to become part of art.
(16:18):
Still though troubling it is. I mean, I, as I said,
I have to kind of put away my my animal
loving brain for a moment and just think about, you know,
the time period and how animals. You know, we're seeing
more as livestock at that point. It wasn't like their
cuddly pet. It was they were working creatures. But also
(16:38):
people would bring him, um, unfortunate specimens that had maybe
not lived very long because they were not healthy. Maybe
once more in line with my two headed snake to
experience um we mentioned earlier. You can find all manner
of images of these things if you look, and some
(16:59):
of them, some of the more malformed ones there. It's
like the kitten with eight legs and two tails, which
is what it's called. It's very basic, um kitten with
eight legs and yeah, kitten with eight legs and two tails.
There's one that has There are a couple who have
like two faces. There are um, you know, there's so
(17:19):
he did those kind of out of fascination, and I
think he was probably studying anatomy at the same time,
you know, what I mean, it was giving him some
clues into how the differences between right and wrong create
the structure properly. But then he was also doing really
artistic works like the Village School, which is a bunch
of tiny bunnies with little chalkboards and they have little desks,
(17:42):
and he would craft all of their accessories as well,
so they're tiny little lesson books. All of that was handmade. Um.
The Guinea Pigs cricket match, that one has always cracked
me up. There is a full Guinea pig band with
brass multi piece. Yeah. There they are full and ready
to play orchestral pieces. There's a pavilion and then there
(18:05):
are the guinea pigs who are getting ready for their
cricket match. And another thing to point out about these
tableau two is they all have these beautifully soft painted
background which seemed so striking against the by this point
kind of dusty Victorian animals. Um, but they add to
that nursery rhyme fairytale quality was trying to go for.
(18:27):
For sure. There's one really odd one that is a
When we first started talking about doing this episode, I
was like, Sarah, you have to see this picture, and
it's a monkey riding a goat, and I don't know why.
Every time I look at it it makes me kind
of chuckle because the expression of the monkey's face is funny.
The whole setup is funny. The proportion of it is
just perfectly hilarious. That one seemed so reminiscent of Barnum
(18:53):
to me because you know, and you can give this
to Potter too, who was not trying to um pull
one over on his audience. It was, you know, this
is a this is a kitten who was born with
two heads or whatnot. He wasn't trying to create creatures
that didn't exist. He was riding in the goat. Was nature?
(19:15):
Just a strange decision to combine two animals into into
one scene like this, and then the big one that um,
I think for people that are fans of his work,
and it is very striking. There's one called The Kitten's Wedding,
and it is a full wedding party comprised of kittens
(19:36):
in full gown, elaborate dresses and jewelry and little suits.
It's it's fascinating and bizarre and there's a grotesque element
to it, but it's also one of those things where
I can't help but think like about the hours of meticulous,
exacting labor that goes into something like this. I mean,
(19:58):
he made teeny tiny austin just to put on each
of them, and they're all quaffed like their hair is
done there. It's it's really quite fascinating to think about
how much just he must have been in love with
his art, because he really did seem to just dedicate
his heart and soul to it. It's easy to focus
solely on the mounts though, and and not look at
(20:22):
not look at the kittens dresses, but look at their face.
Looks quite right, you know. I think, um probably the
goal of many taxidermists today. And we've heard from we
have listeners to who have written in to tell us
about their work. Um, tell us that it's not stuffing,
it's mounting. UM. I think maybe of the modern goal
(20:44):
of taxidermy is to look as though the animal wants alive,
to have the idea of capturing a natural moment, a
living quality about them. And you certainly cannot say that
about Potter's work. And I don't think that was the goal,
but his taxidermy skills wouldn't have allowed that anyway. I
(21:05):
mean the kittens don't have they don't look like they
were ever alive. No, they look like dolls. They really
do have a doll like quality by the time he
has done humanizing them, you know, antropomorphizing them with outfits
and accessories and just concepts that they would not be
put into. Like you know, very few kittens get invited
to weddings in my experience, but so m once in
(21:28):
a while it happens. Um. But yeah, it's not it's
not trying to capture that moment of the animal in
the wild. Some of his um malformed creatures are more
intended to look like their life like state. Um. But
these ones, once he gets into tableau, it's really about
creating something entirely new. Some of the life like quality,
(21:52):
or lack thereof two comes from his skill mounting to
I mean, things didn't always go quite as land, especially
for more exotic animals. Yeah, because he didn't have practice.
He didn't get to practice with them. He got pretty
good at kittens and apparently was very good with birds.
But there is allegedly a baby giraffe that he attempted
(22:14):
that I could never find a photo for that just
didn't come out quite right, um, and then the lion
that looks like it's wearing saggy pantyhose because his the
skin on the legs. You know, it's with any anyone
who's been around a cat, you know that the skin
has some flexibility. But he didn't quite get where it is. Yeah,
(22:35):
it looks and just the stance of the lion too.
It's one of those where Okay, maybe he didn't ever
see a living lion. Maybe he didn't have that opportunity
because the lion doesn't stand quite like that. Yeah, it
looks just off. I mean, you can recognize it as
a lion. There is a certain you know, it's a lion,
(22:56):
so there's a certain natural majesty to it. But you
just something's not quite right. And that reminds me of
of old engravings of descript you know, explorers who have
described animals and then they're illustrated by engravers back in Europe,
and these are African animals or North American animals, and
(23:17):
the illustrator has never seen them, and they're trying to
imagine what the animal looks like. Yeah, it's just not
quite right. A plus effort um, and he continued to
mount his entire life, and then in nineteen fourteen he
suffered a stroke and he never really fully recovered. And
(23:37):
he was I believe seventy nine at the time, so
it wasn't like he was struck down as a very
young man. Um But then in nineteen eighteen he passed
away and he had spent his whole life there in Sussex.
Basically he was buried in the village churchyard um and
his museum was left to his daughter, Minnie Collins and
his grandson alternate also named Walter, but his last was
(24:00):
Collins Uh and they were the curators of the museum
until the nineteen seventies and they basically got to a
point where, you know, they just couldn't handle it anymore.
It was too much work. I mean, that's a lot
to keep going, and so um it got moved first
to Arundel and then in the nineteen eighties it went
(24:23):
to the Jamaica Inn in Cornwall. There was a moment
in the middle where it was almost going to be
shipped off to America because I think that first stopping
point also didn't quite know what to do with it
and didn't have the resources to keep it in good
condition and then the Jamaica in stepped in and said
no, no no, we will take it. So those people hung
onto it until two thousand three and they decided to
(24:47):
liquidate the collection because their curator had died or had
retired rather i'm sorry, and their taxidermists had passed away.
He had leukemia, and they who had maintained all of
these fascinates too. And and it's like to thousand specimens
by that point. And it would be a lot of
work too. It's not something that you can just put
in a case and then forgot about. No, it needs
(25:08):
constant care and maintenance, especially you know as it gets older,
it is more and more work. You sent me a
video from the nineteen sixties where there's a man who
is tending to some of the specimens, I think to
a cow in one of the pictures, which is he
didn't preserve a life size cow, it's a it with
(25:32):
cap skin. But the curator is carefully dusting and cleaning
and then returns the cow to the tableau. It would
be a tremendous amount of work. And also I can
see why the museums would be facing problems in this
time too, because this is kind of kitchy. At this point.
(25:53):
It was very popular in the Victorian era to go
look at mounted animals and they found it quite charming.
There was a growing um sense of unrest at it,
like there wasn't the same Oh that's magical and charming.
It was they saw more of the grotesque than the
charm at that kind of the cob And like we
mentioned earlier, the questions about wait a minute, is this
(26:16):
humane or not? They were all killed a hundred years ago. Yeah,
certain changing tastes played a role in this. Yeah. So,
and it was a Mr. And Mrs Watts that owned
(26:38):
the collection at this point. So in two thousand three
they decided that they would sell the collection, and they
were hoping that someone would buy the whole thing in
one shot and maintain the museum, because even though it
had shifted and was not in the original museum, they
still considered it the museum um And unfortunately that did
not happen. I mean, there were many attempts made. There
(27:00):
was even a landowner nearby that was offering a parcel
for free and saying, you can build a new museum
here if you can keep the collection together. But they
still needed capital to do all of that, and it
never came through, and it it's pretty interesting did numbers
when you look at the prices some of these pieces fetched.
And then we'll come back to sort of some other
(27:20):
things that developed or came to light after the fact.
There was a little bit of scandal, and there were,
as I said, there were lots of people trying to
get together the money to put this thing, to keep
it together and to buy the whole collection outright, but
they just never there was never enough and so eventually,
(27:40):
for example the death and burial of Cock Robin, the
original estimate for what I was going to go for
was ten thousand dollars, and I think it actually went
four twenty five hundred British pounds, which is about thirty
three thousand dollars US at the time of the sale.
And that was the high high mark for for the works,
(28:03):
but a lot of them Kitten's Wedding actually it was
a little bit more. A little more, Yeah, that was
thirty five thousand dollars, but a lot of them were
pulling in in the in the twenties. UM eleven thousand,
ten thousand, Monkey Monkey Riding a Goat brought in eleven thousand,
six hundred dollars, which I think is a bargain, But
(28:25):
I mean there really were even though this is years
and years later. I mean this is in the two thousand's,
there were enough people that knew about his work that
were very excited to go. And you can read some
accounts online of people that were like, Okay, I have
you know, I'm throwing out a random number, like ten
thousand dollars. I'm gonna get whatever I can because I
really want a piece of Walter Potter's legacy. Okay. So
(28:47):
the crazy thing is, though, even though these works went
for way more than expected and ultimately pulled in around
five nine thousand, nine hundred pounds, which is you said,
was twice what they had predicted, the scandal came because
there had apparently been an offer to keep the collection together,
(29:09):
and that offer had been for way more than that
collective price a million pounds, right, and that was from
an artist, a British artist named Damien Hurst. Uh, and
he really wanted it. I mean, he's a fan of
Walter Potter, he knew about his work. He's best known
(29:30):
to by the way, for the shark Suspended tank. When
it came to light that he had actually made an
offer to Bottoms, which was the auction house that handled
the sale. The Watts were actually really upset because they
had never been informed of this offer. As of two
thousand seven, they were threatening to sue Bottom's for not
accepting that offer and for not informing them, because they
(29:52):
were supposed to have notified them if they received any
serious offer to keep the collection intact, and let alone
one that was is so high above what actually Yeah,
so they were planning to sue both for monetary damages
for half a million pounds. But also they really did.
I mean, these are people that actually tended this collection
(30:13):
for years. It's not like they just were trying to
turn it and make a buck. You know. They clearly
cared about it and wanted it to go in one
big set, not piecemeal. It ended up in different lots
and which is I'm sure heartbreaking to people that had
tended to it very lovingly for you know, decades at
that point. So as it stands, Mr Watts has taken
(30:35):
it to court and he said, we have tried to
discuss this amicably, but with no joy. They leave us
with no option to but to pursue our complaint in
the Court, so that seems to be ongoing. It was
no recent update on it, Yeah, I didn't see one,
but there is a different recent update there is, and
the collection is coming together again, although well it did
(30:58):
briefly UM in twenty ten um Damien Hurst again and
he did buy some of the lots. Was basically kind
of using his connections in the art world to try
to put this together in the Museum of Everything, which
is a pop up museum in Primrose Hill in London,
which I apparently used to be a Victoria It was
(31:18):
a dairy and Victorian era and then it became a
recording studio get acoustics, and then it was at least
for this time, a pop up museum space. And so
he actually did get together a lot of the pieces,
even some that had been sold to collectors overseas. I
know there were some pieces that were here in the
US that were being shipped over for the collection. And
(31:40):
it ran until the end of at least I don't
know if any portion of it continued UM as an exhibit,
but I have a feeling this is probably not the
last time we will see people try to put this together,
because it's odd how lovingly people look at this collection
and there's just something about it that it it makes
(32:03):
you want to like pull for it to all come
back together. It does, I mean, I was it's interesting
to look at these and it is such a i
don't know, a strange slice of Victorian life, but the
fascination that people have with it, even though this is
clearly not in style today, it is interesting. And that
(32:26):
there are these people who are investing great deals of
money in it too, to try to reunite these pieces
and bring them all back together. Yeah, it's I mean
when you read accounts of people that were trying to
save it during the two thousand three auction, I mean
there's really like a sense a tone of just dismay
(32:48):
and heart heart break that it's, you know, a pity
they think it's a national treasure. Why isn't you know,
some big institution stepping in and making sure that this
you know, full color action museum doesn't get preserved as
it is. And I wonder to how much of that
comes into nostalgia too, If if this museum was a
favorite place for generations of kids to visit, you know,
(33:13):
through through the seventies certainly, but beyond too, and the
Watts were maintaining it. Um just like I would be
sad if the capital finally put away their two headed snake.
Don't let me know if you work there and it's
gone now. UM I wonder if if people feel that
way too, that this is something um strangely British and
(33:33):
and worth maintaining and celebrating. It's also there's such a
sweetness to the story that it was just basically a
simple kid in the country who had a love for
a thing and that was the only thing he really
did his whole life. I mean, he married, he had
several children, but it was his life's work, was his museum,
in his taxidermy, and you know, mounting animals in new
(33:54):
and creative and artistic ways that no one had ever
thought to do before. There's just you want to cheer
for those people, so you know, you want to maintain
what's left of their work when they're gone, and that
he did have success in his life too, even if
the collection is now going through hard times being split up.
But um, I thought one of the most interesting points
(34:16):
was that at one point the museum was so popular
that they had to extend the railway platform in town
to accommodate the people that were just visitors coming coming
out to visit, coming to see a kitten wedding. They
got an invite to the kitten wedding. They brought their gifts,
they're ready to be fabulous guests and have a good time.
(34:38):
So hopefully we'll see more stories about the Potter collection,
and I would love to see it myself at some point.
That's like one of my bucket list items is to
see at least some decent chunks of the Potter call.
It sounds like kitten wedding is possibly in the States too,
if if because Damien Hurst had had trouble getting to
the collection, they mentioned it was somewhere, but I don't
(34:59):
know if it's in a in a private collection in
somebody's house. This story made me sort of more interested
too in just the history of taxidermy too, and um,
you know how it got to this extremely decorative point
in the late Victorian era, but it's earlier roots too.
(35:21):
And and also I couldn't help but thinking of the
health issues to working with the chemicals. I mean, he
lives to a rifled age. It obviously doesn't seem to
have affected his health, but arsenic there's a lot of
a lot of sludge and gross chemicals that are not
kind to the the body. Um. Yeah, and it's funny
(35:45):
too because we love these things so much. But I
the idea of preserving a beloved pet has certainly fallen
out of favor. I mean, I know there are people
that still do it from time to time, but they're
definitely outliers of like the pet parents and community. I
know fewer people. I don't know any personally. I don't
think that's done that, um, but I know people do it.
(36:07):
So it is kind of a it's an interesting lens
that we can kind of flare out where we really
love this, but we would be a little creeped out
by our own you know, animals being part of something
like that. Well, in that game preservation is still a
totally mainstream Yeah. Suit, I'm suddenly having a flash to
(36:28):
the Field Museum in Chicago. Have you ever been a
huge taxidermy collection? I have not. I thought of the
Biltmore House, the h in there, the Gentleman's Room essentially, Uh,
there is a huge collection of of games. Yeah, if
(36:49):
anyone is in Chicago or is visiting Chicago, go to
the Field and I mean, it's it blows you away
just how many specimens they have on display. They even
have the Ghost in the Darkness, the lions that were
murderous um that there was a movie about them there
on display there. I mean, it's just walking through Museum Hall,
aftrom Museum Hall of Mounted Animals. It's kind of fascinating.
(37:13):
I'm sure we're going to hear from our I hope.
I bet they can give us all manner of insights
that you don't always get when you're doing regular research.
There are things that you learn from the inside of
any trade that you would not normally learn when you're
reading about it or studying about it. So I look
forward to those Pay so much for joining us on
(37:36):
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
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History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old
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