The Development of the Classic Wildlife Diorama
— Gary Hoyle
This article appears in the 2008 Journal of Natural Science Illustration
When I was ten years old my grandfather took our family to the Boston, Massachusetts Museum of Science, where I saw, for the first time, what would enchant me and direct my professional career. I stood before a window facing a sweeping view of the Atlantic coast where a wide variety of birds prowled the shoreline or took to the air. The scene had a magical quality about it, not just because of the view, but because of the arrested motion. Everything in sight was frozen in time. I was looking at one of the most beloved and influential types of exhibits in natural history museums, the classic wildlife diorama, or more appropriately called the habitat diorama.
By the mid-1950s (when I first saw them) habitat dioramas already had a long history. In 1822, Louis Daguerre patented the diorama as a theatrical device, and if his name seems familiar, he was also the inventor of an early photographic process known as the daguerreotype. Daguerre had been a stage designer as well as a painter of a popular form of illusionistic exhibition known as the panorama, which showed exotic views of nature on the curved inner wall of a circular building. Whereas spectators viewed the continuous painting of the panorama from a fixed point in the center of the building, Daguerre’s diorama seated the audience on a platform that rotated between two theatrical stages, enabling the set designer to project changing views of exotic lands through these “stage windows.” The literal Greek translation of diorama is “to see through,” an apt term for this concept of looking through “stage windows.”
The diorama concept of the “stage window” would eventually evolve into what have been called “windows on nature” or “ecological theatre,” fitting designations for the dioramas in natural history museums. Art historian Karen Wonders discovered that this conceptual shift originated in two countries nearly simultaneously, first in Sweden then in the United States of America. That wildlife dioramas are a uniquely Swedish and American tradition has much to do with each country’s self-perception, as Wonders noted in her book, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Natural History Museums.
Wonders found that both countries developed their national identities around the diversity and abundance of their wilderness and hunting traditions. In Sweden this led to the popularity of a unique type of exhibition known as the biological museum, the most famous of which, the Biological Museum of Stockholm, in 1893 utilized the panorama concept of a circular painted background to display mounted animals in a facsimile of their natural environment. Gustaf Kolthoff, a hunter-naturalist trained in taxidermy, first developed this radical type of exhibit in 1875 to display his personal collection. The exhibits had no painted backgrounds, but were a reaction to the standard museum display practices of the day. Wonders quotes Kolthoff, “when he watched the [real] woodcock concealing itself in the moss-covered forest floor, and then saw the same bird standing stiffly on the white shelf of a museum case, it seemed to him as though the most interesting aspect of the bird’s existence was missing.” (Wonders, 1993) Thus his exhibits included small trees, mosses, grass and other fragments of a specimen’s habitat.
As in panorama exhibitions, visitors to the Biological Museum in Stockholm viewed the exhibit from a darkened enclosure in the center of the circular room. The exhibit itself was divided into regional environments by truncated transitions created with trees, artificial ledges and subtle changes in the background painting, so that the entire country of Sweden was represented in one room. So popular was this exhibit that in 1897 visitation peaked at over 100,000 visitors.
Three other biological museums followed, with illusionistic displays based on various aspects of the panorama, most of which broke the circular backdrop into arcs whereby each regional landscape could be viewed in isolation. Though Kolthoff never referred to these later illusionistic exhibits as dioramas, his exhibit concept was consciously being transitioned from the traditional panorama toward what would be regarded today as the classic habitat diorama. The final step in that transformation would be taken by Olof Gylling, one of Kolthoff’s admirers who had a passion for the preservation of the natural environment.
Gylling was a trained scientist, taxidermist and landscape painter who viewed illusionistic wildlife displays as powerful environmental statements about pristine nature and the need to protect it. As such, his exhibit focus targeted specific sites that were, in some instances, critically endangered. His painted backgrounds were therefore faithfully rendered views, and the foreground plant life was carefully fabricated from artificial materials to conform to the specific environment and designed to last for decades (unlike the use of real plants in Kolthoff’s exhibits which had to be replaced periodically). Gylling’s exhibits, though smaller than Kolthoff’s, were successful illusions of nature, not only because the display windows restricted the visitor’s angle of view, but because the scenes were site-specific in both background rendering and foreground details and were sparsely populated with regional wildlife, as opposed to Kolthoff’s more crowded exhibits with regional landscape backgrounds. In 1902, Gylling created his first exhibit of this type and co-opted the term “diorama” to describe it. Very likely he saw the evolution of Daguerre’s diorama from its forerunner the panorama exhibit, as typifying the progression from Kolthoff’s Stockholm Biological Museum concept. Gylling’s exhibits could thus be described as stage windows on environmental theater.
While Gylling was creating his first diorama in Sweden, similar exhibits were being constructed in the United States. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Frank Chapman, the Curator of Ornithology, was constructing exhibits for a new Hall of North American Birds. Like Gylling, Chapman was an ardent preservationist. Along with his museum duties he wrote popular bird books and founded the periodical, Bird- Lore, which contributed significantly to the conservation movement in America. He was particularly concerned with the rapid decline in bird populations caused by market hunters and “plume hunters” for the millinery trade. In 1898 he created an artificial ledge topped with tufts of painted grass for over 70 specimens of marine birds, their chicks and eggs. The exhibit had no painted backdrop but closely mimicked contours of Bird Rock Island, a site once known for hundreds of thousands of nesting birds, that had, by then, been reduced to a wasteland of less than a hundred birds. By documenting the site as it existed before the slaughter, Chapman sought not only to preserve a moment of the past, but to create in the public mind urgency for the island’s protection. In his new series of exhibits Chapman introduced painted backgrounds to better evoke the illusion of place in regards to threatened birds and habitats. The first exhibit in the series, “Summer Bird-Life of Cobb’s Island, Virginia,” was unveiled in 1902. Though the illusion of space is compromised by the background being painted on a flat surface, it was the first exhibit of its type to be endorsed by a scientific institution. Where the building’s architecture allowed, further exhibits in the series were designed with curved backgrounds. Chapman called these exhibits “habitat groups,” and saw them as a logical outgrowth of the earlier museumapproved exhibition known as the “artistic group.”
Essentially, the “artistic group” consisted of several individuals of a single species mounted in natural poses surrounded by a three-dimensional facsimile of their environment. Such an exhibit was commonly viewed from all four sides. In 1887, when Frank Chapman was hired at the American Museum of Natural History, a series of these exhibits was already being created to showcase the variety of small birdlife in the New York area, based on a similar series developed at the British Museum of Natural History. Supposedly unknown to the Americans, these British exhibits had been inspired by aspects of Kolthoff’s Biological Museum in Stockholm.
The group method was developed by William Hornaday while employed at Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, an institution renowned not only as a supply house for natural history specimens, but as a training center for a generation of museum professionals, who were destined to transform exhibits in natural history museums. At Ward’s, Hornaday learned taxidermy under the guidance of talented craftsmen who had emigrated from Europe, where taxidermy was considered most refined. In 1880, he unveiled his artistic group, “Fight in the Treetops,” at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The exhibit depicted two male orangutans battling for dominance in the jungle canopy, complete with lush artificial foliage and flowering orchids. Hornaday wisely chose to make the exhibit faithful to nature but with enough melodramatic appeal for Victorian tastes, creating a sophisticated challenge to the long tradition of museums displaying rows of stiffly mounted specimens profiled against a plain white backdrop. The acceptance of this exhibit by the scientific community legitimized the artistic group as a display model for museums and secured for Hornaday the position of Chief Taxidermist at the National Museum of Natural History.
Shortly after completing a noteworthy series of small animal groups for the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1889, Carl Akeley, another Ward’s graduate, began a series of experimental exhibits in private. Using innovative taxidermy methods and his patented process for making artificial leaves, Akeley created what he called “Four Seasons,” a series of exhibits depicting the seasonal changes of whitetail deer. To further enhance his exhibits, he hired a trained panorama artist, Charles Abel Corwin, to paint a background for each exhibit. When completed in 1902, “Four Seasons” was purchased by Akeley’s employer, the Field Columbian Museum (later called simply the Field Museum), perhaps in reaction to Chapman’s exhibit developments in New York. The Field Museum could now claim correctly to be the first scientific institution to exhibit large mammal groups with painted backgrounds. The following year the museum appointed Corwin as its staff artist to paint diorama backgrounds, a position that he held until his death in 1938.
When “Four Seasons” was re-installed in the Field’s new facility in 1921 Corwinproduced new backgrounds for the exhibits. (He was likely dissatisfied with his original work, and of course by then he had accumulated nearly twenty years of experience as a background painter). At that time Akeley was in Africa hunting mountain gorillas and other specimens for the American Museum of Natural History’s proposed African Hall. Akeley had left the Field [Columbian] Museum in 1909 shortly after Marshall Field’s death had put a hold on Akeley’s plan to produce a major African Hall for that museum.
With the acceptance of the diorama art form as a sanctioned exhibit model for museums of natural history, institutions began to refine both the diorama’s illusionistic quality and its fidelity to site-specific regions of the natural world. Taxidermists, model makers and landscape painters were taken along as members of expeditions sent by museums, to not only collect indigenous flora and fauna, but to meticulously record the full visual dimension of a particular locale. By 1936, such efforts brought the habitat diorama to its full potential. That year the American Museum of Natural History opened the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, filled with dioramas that were bold visions of scientific accuracy and artistic skill. In little over a hundred years, theatrical exhibits based on popular forms of illusionism had been transformed into the most profound and influential exhibits of natural history museums. The perfect merging of science and art had been accomplished..
POSTSCRIPT
Despite past considerations to dismantle Kolthoff’s Biological Museum in Stockholm, it survives today and has been restored as an artifact of cultural history. Though an alleged arson fire threatened the museum this past July, the damage must have been minimal, because a September 9 email to me from Karen Wonders states that in mid-August she “was right in front of the Biologiska Museet” and was unaware that a fire had occurred. Many of Gylling’s dioramas have been restored and are on public display.
Unfortunately in America, many historically important exhibits have not survived. In a September 8, 2008, email, Stephen Quinn, Senior Project Manager of Exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, noted that Frank Chapman’s Bird Rock Group “was dismantled many years ago.” This undoubtedly occurred between 1940 and 1964, durng the time that the Chapman Hall of North American Birds was closed for renovations. It probably coincided with the dismantling of the Cobb’s Island Group in 1959. However, some pivotal exhibits have survived. According to Steve Quinn, the American Robin Group, first in a series of artistic groups at the American Museum of Natural History, “still exists here at the AMNH.” Hornaday’s “Fight in the Treetops” also survives at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. At The Field Museum in Chicago, Carl Akeley’s Four Seasons is still on exhibit, although Sally Metzler, on page 13 of her book Theatres of Nature: Dioramas at the Field Museum, notes that these exhibits along with other displays from the old Field Columbian Museum “were reinstalled after significant enhancements.” The 1934 Mountain Gorilla Group has become so famous it has reached iconic status. A 2003 conservation survey of this exhibit and others in the American Museum of Natural History’s African Hall insures a long and serious stewardship toward these profound exhibits.
FOOTNOTE
The Field Museum originated when Marshall Field purchased the entire collection of natural history specimens exhibited by Ward’s Natural Science Establishment during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That is why the original museum title was the Field Columbian Museum. By the time the museum moved into “new digs” in 1921, the designation Columbian had become archaic and was replaced by Museum of Natural History [a title in vogue at the time], but even before 1921 most references to the Field Columbian Museum had been shortened to the Field Museum [today’s official title of the museum].
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Foremost, I wish to thank my mentor in museum exhibit work, Fred Scherer, for instilling in me an appreciation of the history of the diorama art form, especially its development at the American Museum of Natural History. Without his “spark” this article would not have been written. I am particularly indebted to Karen Wonders whose work constitutes the backbone of this article. I greatly appreciate her correspondence and that of Steve Quinn’s over the years in regards to the history and importance of these unique exhibits as art in their own right. I also wish to thank the staff of the library services at both the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum for their rapid and professional responses to my request for archival images. Last, but by no means least, I wish to thank Trudy Nicholson for her suggestion to write this article and the encouragement that she has given me throughout the process.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary Hoyle’s 35-year career spans the breadth of museum exhibit work from research to exhibit fabrications. He studied his craft for ten years under the tutelage of Fred Scherer, a 38-year veteran of the American Museum of Natural History [Mr. Scherer worked as a background painter with famed diorama artists James Perry Wilson and Francis Lee Jaques and as an exhibits preparator under James Clark and George Peterson.]. During his 28 year tenure at the Maine State Museum [1973-2001], Mr. Hoyle designed and fabricated a major portion of exhibit elements for the permanent exhibit halls, headed the 100 person excavation of the first discovered bones of a woolly mammoth in Maine, and worked as a team member in the relocation and restoration of four historically important habitat dioramas. He has created exhibits and artistic works for museums and corporations around the nation. His fanciful dinosaur illustrations toured the country for three years in “The Dinosaur Show” sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. Recently he was appointed Artist in Residence for the Climate Change Institute to develop a cartoon series to explain aspects of global warming to the general public. He lives with his wife, Jeanne, and their two cats Emma and Olaf on an island six miles off the coast of Maine.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Metzler, S., 2007. Theatres of Nature: Dioramas at the Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois: The Field Museum.
- Quinn, S., 2006. Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York: Harry N. Abrams.
- Wonders, K., 1989. Exhibiting Fauna—From Spectacle to Habitat Group. Curator (32/2):131- 156.
- Wonders, K., 1993. Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History, Uppsala, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.