Arab Courier Attacked by Lions

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