Even in a taxidermied state, exotic beasts and birds incited imaginings of the living creature, its behaviors, the look of its native geographic, and – with dangerous beasts – the titillating fear of its savagery. On display at Bullock's Museum in the early nineteenth century was a cabinet featuring a Bengal tiger locked in a deadly battle with a boa constrictor, two creatures of near mythical menace, surrounded by luxuriant artificial foliage to intensify the “natural” aura of the scene. In the museum’s catalogue, Bullock made sure to describe the combat as luridly as possible:

Bullock's tiger is still on display at the Rossendale
Museum in Lancashire, England.  Go +"The Royal Tiger (F. Tigrina). This is represented expiring in one of those dreadful combats which take place betwixt this powerful and sanguinary destroyed of the human species, and the immense serpent of India, called the Boa Constrictor, in whose enormous folds its unavailing strength is nearly exhausted, and its bones crushed and broken by the strength and eights of its tremendous adversary.”

Big snakes and big cats obviously excited visitors’ sense of the drama and death on colonial frontiers.  Viewers couldn't help but be impressed.

Organized by Tate Modern in London and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux and Musee d'Orsay in Paris, last year’s exhibition “Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris” was a spectacular display of not just the French artist’s painting but also an extensive selection of documents and various ephemera from the period. The most interesting addition was the stuffed lion attacking an antelope from the zoological galleries at Paris’ Jardin des Plantes, where Rousseau studied the anatomy and frozen movements of exotic animals. You can see just how closely he studied the creatures in his painting, “The Hungry Lions Throws Itself on the Antelope."  The lion's claws rip the antelope's nose, it's teeth embedded in the victim's neck.  Rousseau did add a few sensational touch with the gashes and red claws marks.

As Roberta Smith writes in a rewiew of the show in the New York Times:

"Rousseau lived in a time when the byproducts of French colonialism, aided by new means of mass reproduction, seem to have provided the folks back home with some of their most popular, titillating forms of entertainment. Wild beasts, people and adventures were depicted in pulp novels, postcards, photographs and tabloid magazines like Le Petit Journal, whose color covers depict, pre-Barnum and pre-Hollywood, a dazzling stream of rampaging tigers, damsels in distress, bloodthirsty natives and embattled explorers and animal trainers."

Rousseau never in fact left France, His fantasy landscapes were imaginative constructions from various bits of exotic flotsam that reached Paris: the plants and animals in the botanical gardens, zoos, and museums, tantalizing description in books, and images from magazines and postcards. The taxidermy, however, obviously had an overwhelming influence on his imagination.  And how could it not?  The piece is remarkable executed and remarkably animated.  Just think, without taxidermy, would Rousseau have been the artist he was?

Read more from Smith's review +

image: from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. photographer: Melinda McNaugher

Created by the French taxidermist Jules Verreaux, "Arab Courier Attacked by Lions" won on the gold medal for excellence at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1869. Verreaux fashioned the lions and the camel from metal frameworks wrapped with excelsior or straw, over which the animal skins were stretched. Although some or all of the original skulls and teeth were used, facial details were cast in plaster. The human figure was constructed of steel rods wrapped in horsehair or excelsior and covered with a knitted cotton fabric. The face and hands are painted plaster casts. The tableau's label accentuates the lurid drama of the piece:

The Jaws of Death Action that cries for sound – a vibrating roar from the big cat mingled with the bellowing groans of the terror-stricken Dromadary. The one-ball flintstock, lying with ramrod twisted and useless across the slain lioness, has done its work. One thin blade remains to stand off the finality of the charge – a charge with the swiftness of death in it.

The piece was purchased with the entire Verreaux collection by the American Museum of Natural History in 1869. It was subsequently exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, and later acquired by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh in 1899, where it is still on display. In addition to exemplifying a genre of taxidermy which has fallen out of favour, especially by sober natural history museums, Arab Courier has also acquired a further significance in the intervening years. The Barbary lion is now extinct: the last survivors were shot in Morocco in the 1920s. Verreaux's two specimens and several animals in the Leiden Musem are all that remain of the species today.

link: read more from the Carnegie Natural History Museum's website: http://www.carnegiemnh.org/exhibits/courier.htm