Photos Walter Potter's Whimsical, Twisted Taxidermy

The contemporary hunger for pictures of impossibly cute kittens, puppies, cubs, goslings, kits, etc. is staggering and possibly unprecedented in human history. This is evidenced by countless Pinterest pages, Twitter accounts, and Buzzfeed posts such as “23 Bunnies Snoozin’,” “17 Baby Elephants Learning How to Use Their Trunks,” and “These Hedgehog Faces Are the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Twitter.” By some estimates (mine) nearly 80 percent of the Internet’s entire bandwidth is devoted to videos of puppies kissing babies, or vice versa.

But cuteness, like pornography, has ever been with us. Witness the fact that Victorian England had its own analog, dust-collecting version of “36 Painfully Adorable Pictures of Puppies at Bath Time” in the work of cult taxidermist Walter Potter, who once upon a time was famous for his elaborate, awwwww-inspiring, ew-provoking tableaux of dead baby animals aping human behavior.

These works, the subject of a new book, Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy (Blue Rider Press), may seem quintessentially Victorian in their merging of kitsch and morbidity—almost to the point of parody. But they also have a zany pop aspect, like something conjured by Beatrix Potter (no relation) during an acid trip. The artist Peter Blake, who designed the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is a fan and collector of Walter Potter’s, as well he should be: Potter’s colorful, dense, prop-cluttered assemblages are a clear precursor to—if not an inspiration for—the neo-Victorian fantasia Blake conjured for the Beatles. He contributes a foreword to the new book, which was written by British taxidermy aficionados Dr. Pat Morris and Joanna Ebenstein. Their enthusiastic but plodding style may put you in mind of a local historical-society brochure—but charmingly so. Anyway, the pictures, excerpted below and in a longer slide show here, are the point.

Potter, we learn, was born in 1835 in the West Sussex village of Bramber, where his father ran a pub. He caught the taxidermy bug, if we may call it that, as a teenager, learning how to stuff dead birds and other animals and starting a collection that eventually blossomed into a small museum, which, in various guises, would remain intact into this century. He was 19, in 1854, when he began constructing his first tableau, based on the children’s poem “The Death and Burial of Cock Robin” (also known as “Who Killed Cock Robin?”). It would take seven years to complete, providing “an amusing activity and also a constructive repository for many of his stuffed spare birds.” In depicting the title character’s funeral cortege, Potter would ultimately stuff and mount nearly 100 dead birds, including several species that are now extinct, or nearly so, in Sussex—a fact the authors relate in the sort of ur-English aside that lends their text its appeal.

Is The Death and Burial of Cock Robin truly Potter’s “great masterpiece” and also “perhaps the most widely known single item of Victorian taxidermy?” I lack the expertise to dispute either claim. Personally, I am a fan of Potter’s later, more weirdly anthropomorphized work, such as his classroom of bunny rabbits reading, sewing, and working on their penmanship; or his kitten’s garden party, complete with a croquet game and a table set for 14; or his “men’s” club for squirrels.

Beyond their mute testimony to the obsessions of a single Victorian eccentric with too much time on his hands, do these tableaux tell us anything about human nature, or about our relationship to the animal world? What does it say about me that what I like most about Potter’s work is the way the realism of the animals is undercut by the dead glass eyes he screwed into their faces? Potter may have stumbled into history’s first Uncanny Valley.

Judged from the book’s pictures alone, the finest (in this context a synonym for “creepiest”) work in Potter’s oeuvre is The Kittens’ Wedding, his last complete tableau. It features 20 dead kittens, including a bride, groom, minister, and wedding party, all wearing extremely elaborate Victorian dresses or suits. The bride even has a teeny gold ring on a tuft of her gnarled little left paw. The overall effect is what a horde of zombies might look like if they were conjured by your Etsy-obsessed, Cuteness Overload-loving mom.

As you look at these images, you may find yourself wondering how Potter came by his animals. Morris and Ebenstein provide helpful answers:

Many of the birds that Potter mounted were brought in by visitors who had found them dead under telephone wires or killed by local cats. Most of the kittens came from a farm near Henfield, where a number of cats roamed freely and bred without restraint. It was customary for cat owners, in those days before spaying or neutering was widely performed, to keep one kitten from a litter and destroy the rest; the proprietors of the Henfield farm donated their disposed stock to Potter to be put to good use. Young rabbits, similarly surplus stock and infant deaths, were obtained from a Mr. Feast, a breeder who lived own the road in Beeding.

Local hunters supplied Potter with dead squirrels; local dogs supplied him with dead rats. For anthropomorphic purposes, Potter particularly prized squirrels and toads because, of all his subjects, their proportions came closest to human anatomy. Amphibians, we learn, have a special appeal for taxidermists: “Toads and frogs are best skinned by turning them inside out through the mouth, which is why no ugly line of stitches is visible on these animals’ bellies.”

Here's a link to a slideshow of Potter’s most elaborate creations. Enjoy!