In spite of the thousands of words ... recorded in our ponderous dictionaries, there are some that seem still to be needed, among them one to define the modern taxidermist ... whose work can only be considered as art because it certainly is not nature.” So wrote Frederic Lucas in 1927.

Lucas, who was a natural historian, a taxidermist, and the Director of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)in New York, struggled to assign artistic implication to taxidermy, a term which etymologically means ‘moving skin.’ The attempt to situate taxidermy in the realm of creativity is complicated by the conflicting roles involved in its creation and appreciation. The artistic nature of taxidermic preparation depends on the intent of an object’s creator. Moreover, a taxidermied object itself can be understood alternatively as art, trophy, or research specimen based on the context in which it has been placed.

LIFELIKE IN THE DETAILS

In his early adulthood, Lucas worked as an assistant for Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, the business that supplied Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) with many of its taxidermied specimens in the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Founded by Louis Agassiz, the MCZ is an institution dedicated to the understanding of evolutionary and ecological relationships between organisms. It falls under the umbrella of the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH), the public face of three research museums. Largely due to expeditions taken by Ward’s Natural Science Establishment and other companies centuries ago, the HMNH has a collection of taxidermied primates, as well as many endangered or extinct animals now protected from hunting. In an age of nature documentaries and zoos, museums such as the HMNH still provide academics and members of the public alike with the opportunity to come face-to-face with animals they would otherwise never encounter.

“Taxidermy is brilliant,” says Judith Chupasko, Curatorial Associate in Mammology at the MCZ. “It’s a good way to preserve an animal so people can see what it looked like when it was alive, and a good taxidermy mount can last hundreds of years.” Successful taxidermy is often considered the ability to make a specimen appear as lifelike as possible, whether the intent is to depict accurately its size, features, and posture, or to represent the ‘essence’ of the animal. “You have to be an artist to make an animal look lifelike,” Chupasko says. “Animals are fluid and move gracefully. To capture that movement in a dead animal means that in some way you’re bringing the dead back to life.”

Working for commercial, scientific, or artistic purposes, taxidermists abide by essentially the same technical process. First, they receive an animal that has died after being shot by a hunter, injured in an accident, or collected for scientific study. An intensive procedure ensues. The taxidermist skins the animal, takes precise measurements of its carcass, and tans the animal’s hide in order to preserve it.

The category of scientific taxidermy includes specimens made for both public displays and research collections. For the latter, preparation differs slightly; skins are often simply flattened, and there is no attempt to recreate the appearance of a living animal. Research collections also preserve the skeleton and a tissue sample, from which DNA can be extracted. “With research preparation, you’re a little stymied in terms of being creative, because the point is to produce specimens that all look the same,” says Professor Hopi Hoekstra, Curator of Mammology at the MCZ.

On the other hand, Hoekstra says, specimens prepared for public display offer opportunities for artistic expression. Created for museums, homes, and competitions, these objects require an armature to be built precisely following the measurements taken from the original animal. While modern-day warehouses supply Styrofoam forms with a degree of particularity that differentiates between upright whitetail deer and semi-upright whitetail deer, taxidermists a century ago made their own mannequins from wood wool, plaster, and wire. Details have remained important: glass eyes, for instance, must be species-specific. Taxidermists often have hundreds if not thousands of reference photographs of animals—their eyes, ears, noses, fur patterns, and muscle structure.

THE PLASTER UNDERNEATH

“Taxidermy is in a way like a particular kind of sculpture,” says Professor Ivan Gaskell, whose class—United States in the World 30: “Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History”—examines how objects other than texts can be used to explore and write history. The course incorporates an exhibition, housed in the Science Center’s Collection of Historical Instruments, featuring several taxidermied specimens. “Taxidermied animals have the appearance of tremendous verisimilitude,” Gaskell says, “but they also make you think about artifice ... The whole of the interior is completely different from that creature when it was alive. In some of the older specimens in the MCZ, you can see that artifice because the specimens are decaying.”

Indeed, while mounts can last centuries, they often have to be renovated: teeth crack, fur dulls, and skin decays, revealing the plaster underneath. The giraffe at the HMNH, for example, now has duct tape reinforcing the hide on its neck. However, because of animal protection regulations, the museum cannot simply commission a new giraffe, meaning many of the decaying animals on display are the only ones available for public viewing. This problem raises a question: is the art of taxidermy found in its product—the lifelike specimen—or is it in the act of artificially reproducing the animal?

According to Gaskell, the desire to make specimens appear as lifelike as possible resulted in the production of dioramas, such as those in the famous Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the AMNH. Regardless of how those who engage in taxidermy view its position in the art world, a move to create beautiful naturalistic settings around specimens reveals a desire to motivate viewers to perceive art.

“People talk about the dioramas as art,” says Michaela Thompson, a doctoral candidate in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thompson created an online archive for “Tangible Things” that explores the history of the Bengal tiger specimen in the HMNH. “[The dioramas] are supposed to represent the habitats of the animals and transport you,” she says. “It may be harder to look at the mounts themselves and say they are pieces of art too.” According to Thompson, the way in which a viewer perceives a specimen depends largely on its curation. In the HMNH, most of the older mounts are arranged in glass cases, and the rooms—usually dimly lit—are divided by continent. Recently, attempts have been made to cast the collections in a more textured setting: some of the walls behind the cases have been painted a bright, solid color, and embellishments such as woodchips have been scattered on the floor.

Indeed, museums have employed various methods in an attempt to aestheticize taxidermy. “The Language of Color,” which opened in the HMNH in 2008, is an exhibition that crosses taxonomic boundaries and features organisms that have evolved color for camouflage, mimicry, and sexual selection. According to Thompson, many specimens in the menagerie of beautifully colored creatures featured in this display have been carefully selected for both aesthetic and educational reasons. “It’s about spectacle. Museums want people to come and say, ‘oh that’s beautiful,’” she says. “I bet the people who come into this exhibit have a different reaction to these specimens than to some of the other animals.”

This desire for spectacle may be as important as the need for realism. When animals were commissioned for the MCZ, a teaching museum, they were intended for biology students first and the public second. But Thompson points to a specimen like the Bengal tiger that evokes drama as much as it exists as a teaching tool. Outstretched, with its teeth bared, the tiger seems to manifest its description on the label beneath it: “Many districts of India have been terrorized by this species which has acquired a taste for human flesh.” The labels likely date to the late 1800s or early 1900s, Thompson says. “These exhibits reflect an aesthetic sensibility but they also subtly reflect political, cultural, and social sensibilities of their time. In the case of the tiger, the cultural understanding of the tiger was that they are fierce, so they have their teeth bared. Other animals could do as much damage to you, but they look benign in their cases,” she says.