Page 63 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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creator of the bird dioramas at the AMNH, stated that the exhibits ‘should
appeal to sightseers as well as fact-seekers’, in contrast to the view of Joseph
Henry at the Smithsonian, who had declared in 1856 that the museum was not
intended ‘merely to attract the attention and gratify the curiosity of the casual
visitor’ (Wonders 1993: 127; Conn 1998: 40).
The dioramas could appeal to sightseers because of their association with
popular spectacle. They were closely related to the panoramas of the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. These great paintings in the round were housed
in specially constructed buildings with viewing platforms in the centre. They
specialized in bird’s-eye views of landscapes, townscapes and battle scenes, and
developed from theatre sets which had become increasingly illusionistic and
landscape-based (Schwartz 1998: 149–76; Wonders 1993). By the end of the
nineteenth century, the period of the first natural history habitat groups, pano-
ramas were addressing an increasingly broad audience. In Paris, for instance,
lowered entry fees accompanied increased illusionism: using technical devices
and three-dimensional objects, the aim was to envelope the spectator, giving
them the sensation of being in the scene (Schwartz 1998: 149–52, 162). Unlike
older popular entertainments, the new ‘attractions’ of the nineteenth century
relied on stimulating sensations through illusionism, and in the process trans-
forming the visitor from participant to spectator (Gunning 1989, 1990; Crary
2002: 11). Such attractions often included taxidermy, which was transformed
from a set of individual isolated curiosities into a key component of illusionistic
scenarios. In London, William Bullock’s Egyptian Hall, which opened in 1812,
incorporated animal specimens in panorama-like attractions. For instance, in
the 1820s, Bullock constructed a Mexico-themed display, in which a large three-
sided painting of a Mexican landscape formed the backdrop to a mixed display
including taxidermy, casts of Aztec artefacts, and fake plants (Crary 2002: 10).
In popular displays of taxidermy, it became commonplace to pose animals
against painted backdrops in dramatic and spectacular ways, suggestive of
ferocity and wildness.
At first, ‘serious’ museums steered clear of these kinds of displays, preferring
simple poses and blank backgrounds for their taxidermy. Then, the year after it
was founded, the AMNH bought ‘Arab Courtier attacked by Lions’ by Jules
Verreaux, which had won a gold medal at the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition.
This was a glass case with a flat painted scene at the back, a mannequin
slumped on a camel and two taxidermied lions. In 1882 it bought William
Hornaday’s ‘Fight in the Treetops’, a tableau of fighting orang-utans (Wonders
1993: 114–5). The purchase of such tableaux marks out the AMNH as pursuing
a particularly populist strategy. Museum staff and trustees saw the museum as
a site of ‘rational amusement’ and ‘a resort for popular entertainment’ (Jesup
and Boas cited in Griffiths 2002: 7, 5). In Sweden, the habitat diorama followed