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the panorama format closely. Gustaf Kolthoff’s Biological Museum, which
opened in Stockholm in 1893, shows a continuous panoramic display of
taxidermy animals against a curved painted backdrop, and viewers stand in
a central tower reminiscent of Thomas Bentham’s Panopticon prison (see
Foucault 1979: 200–9).
In the United States, panoramas and natural history dioramas were linked by
painting style and composition. American natural history museums commis-
sioned painters with experience in the popular illusionistic techniques of the
panorama (Wonders 1993: 187–91). These painters were also influenced by
artists such as Thomas Moran, Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, who
painted large-scale landscapes of the vast American wilderness in the 1850s and
60s, combining topographical study and Romantic composition. The diorama
painters were well trained in illusionistic devices used to give impressions of
realism, and three-dimensional depth. Techniques such as strong contrasts and
sudden drops separating foreground and background heightened the illusion
and helped to conceal the join between the three-dimensional models in the
foreground, and the painting behind. American museums took the illusionism
of the panoramas further by developing highly realistic taxidermy techniques.
At the AMNH, Carl Akeley developed the technique of mounting the skin on a
cast made from a sculptural model, which was based on precise measurements
of the corpse and observations made of the living animal. The vivid and
detailed musculature this technique produces can give the animals the appear-
ance of being just about to move (this is most evident in the mountain lions and
jaguars in the North American Mammals hall at the AMNH which opened
in 1942). Akeley and his colleagues made an astonishing permanent representa-
tion of the tiniest transient details: we see perfectly lifelike plants which never
wilt, the moisture of a rhinoceros’s nostril and of the wet mud in which it
wades.
The dioramas enter natural history at the point of the decline in popularity
of natural history as a practice. This was connected to the increasing profes-
sionalization of field naturalism – the study of species in their habitats. In
Britain, numbers practicing field naturalism declined even as the London
Natural History Museum gained its own building, separated its study collec-
tions from its show collections, and attracted over 400,000 visitors a year. In the
United States, however, field naturalism gained in status because of the domin-
ance of the sportsmen, a moneyed male elite of hunter–naturalists and col-
lectors. Sportsmen were important figures for most natural history museums in
Europe and America, but at the AMNH they dominated the exhibitions policy.
The men who initiated the first habitat dioramas were sportsmen and most
dioramas were of species considered to be game (Wonders 1993: 149). The
Boone and Crocket Club, a sportsman’s society established in 1888, counted