Using real animals to bring fables to life – what can be termed anthropomorphic taxidermy – was vastly popular in the late nineteenth-century, especially in England. The works of amateur naturalist Walter Potter are perhaps the most numerous and famous. When Potter's Museum of Curiosities was sadly sold piece by piece at auction in 2003, his Kitten Wedding from the final years of the nineteenth century realised a phenomenal $35,000 putting each of the eighteen bulgy-eyed kittens - where' my calculator - at almost 2,000 a pop.

George Swaysland and Edward Hart, both well-respected commercial taxidermists, also produced similarly strange fantasies in fur. Swaysland even reproduced his own version of Potter’s most famous piece, “The Death and Burial of Cock Robin.” And of course there was Hermann Ploucquet, a taxidermist from the Royal Museum in Stuttgart who introduced the genre of anthropomorphic taxidermy to England with his display at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.

Ploucquet’s most admired pieces included a series illustrating the German fable Reinecke the Fox, hedgehogs ice-skating, six kittens serenading a piglet underneath her window, and a stoat physician. Plouquet’s technical facility and imaginative talents so delighted audiences that a book of engravings was published immediately so that “one of the cleverest and most popular displays in the GREAT EXHIBTION … may be long perpetuated.” Even the Queen commented on Plocquet’s works in her diary, declaring them to be “really marvellous.”

The theatricality of Plocquet's works and their phenomenal popularity might suggest that Plouquet was more showman than serious naturalist. And yet the overt expressiveness of Ploucquet’s taxidermy was in fact a turning point in the improvement of English techniques.

As Montagu Browne claims in his Practical Taxidermy (1898), English taxidermists “had their eyes opened” by Ploucquet’s works, which gave admirable attention to “the more correct and artistic delineation of animals” and taught “the increased care necessary to more perfectly render the fine points required in giving animals that serio-comic and half-human expression which was so intensely ridiculous and yet admirable.” It was this skill in modelling expressions of hope, fear, love, and rage in squirrels, hedgehogs, weasels, and foxes that was such “an immense step in the advance of the old wooden school of taxidermy; gaunt, erect, and angular.” Browne admits that the humorous and imaginative qualities of the works made them unsuitably humorous for display in natural history museums, yet since the ability to craft and mould accurately animals' expressive attitudes was vitally important to taxidermy, Browne was willing to admit that anthropomorphic taxidermy had some merit.

A nauseated wild cat from the nineteent century. Still on
display at the Harvard Natural History Museum.And of course, expressive taxidermy is crucial to its reality effect. Without some suggestion of intensity or thought or desire, stuffed animals seem frozen in blank stares like fur-covered cardboard, which much of Victorian taxidermy actually resembled. The Victorians themselves had a fair amount to say about the deplorable state of most stuffed creatures of the day. Sir William Henry Flowers, the director of the Natural History Museum, London addressed the issue:

“I cannot refrain from saying a word upon the sadly-neglected art of taxidermy, which continues to fill the cases of most of our museums with wretched and repulsive caricatures of mammals and birds, out of all natural proportions, shrunken here and bloated there, and in attitudes absolutely impossible for the creatures to have assumed while alive.”

And Montagu Brown tended to wax verbose about what he termed "dry-as-dust" collections filled with "very atrociously-rendered mammals, a greater sprinkling of funereal and highly-disreputable birds, some extremely-protracted fishes, some chipped insects, and a lot of shells."