Twee Magazine

Walter Potter's Curious World of Taxidermy.

Sometimes the most surprising things rise, wane, and then rise again. Let us take novelty taxidermy, as an example. With some reflection, the fact that we stuff animals at all is a bit odd, and odder still that we sometimes decorate our houses with lifelike corpses of creatures we have killed.

But it is strangest yet that sometimes we take the remains of an animal and make something new out of it, as did Walter Potter. And what he made was marvelous, and was long seen as marvelous, and then people became briefly immune to marvels and lost interest in his work. But now are now in the era of Walter Potter rediscovery, as his influence can be seen in the rise of "rogue taxidermy," which takes roadkill and transforms it into art. In fact, there was a movie, "Dinner for Schmucks" from 2010, that starred Steve Carell as a modern Walter Potter-style taxidermist. The film didn't do very well, but the taxidermy was perfect.

So let us discuss Potter. He was from a family that owned a British pub, the White Lion in West Sussex, which was very old and looks exactly like you imagine an old British pub would look -- so, already very twee. Potter developed a childhood interest in traditional taxidermy, one he would turn into a career, but at age 19 he grew to be obsessed with a picture book of nursery rhymes owned by his sister.

In the Victorian era, as now, children's stories often were about tiny animals doing the sorts of things humans do. Potter, with his dubious talent for preserving animals (Damien Hirst, a fan of Potter, has complained anyway that his taxidermy wasn't all that good), set out to create nursery rhyme-style tableaux of tiny animals doing the sorts of things humans do. The first example of this is perhaps the most legendary, "The Death and Burial of Cock Robin" based on the ancient English nursery rhyme. His diorama, which looks almost like a religious icon, has the bird carried in a tiny coffin by fellow birds, surrounded, in turn, by all the animals from the original poem, as well as 98 species of birds. It took Potter seven years.

The Death and Burial of Cock Robin.

Potter continued like this, creating elaborate dioramas of animals, often featuring extraordinary details, including tiny props, furniture, and costumes. Potter's dioramas caught on with the public, and eventually he had his own museum near the pub, as well as an annex at the train station. The museum remained open until 1970 --  a run of about 111 years -- and reopened in Cornwall in 1984, where it briefly enjoyed a renaissance. Interest waned, however, and the collection was sold off in 2003.

Here are some additional samples of Potter's work:

A village school of rabbits.

A kitten tea party.

A cat wedding.

Rats gambling in a basement pub.