Stuffed animals
Oscar Humphries says taxidermy is very in My dog has cancer. We found a lump the size of a goji berry on his paw. Tomorrow the vet operates and I've been telling anyone who will listen about our sad news. At parties it's, 'Hi, I'm Oscar, my dog has cancer'; in cabs I say, 'Bond Street please. My dog has cancer. How about that Ken Livingstone?' We think he'll live — it is a 'minor' cancer but it's paws for thought. I'd be sad to see him go. After all, he's only four. Ours is, however, a complicated relationship and I think you can love your pet but you don't have to like it. Gus is the Eve Harrington of pugs. I introduced him to my mother. The two get on like a house on fire — walks in the park, trips to the seaside. Before I knew it he'd got my bedroom and his own shelf in the fridge. Gus's mortality is not something I can or want to ignore. Does one bury a dog? Cremate him? Stuff him? I'm for the last one.
Taxidermy is back in fashion. Interior decorators are selling narwhal tusks and stuffed pelicans to the Chelsea elite. Walk down Pimlico Road and as well as seeing clamshells and about eight Bamford shops you see glass-eyed animals staring static from atop Russian commodes. For years taxidermy was banished to dusty antique shops in Scotland where you could pick up a flea-ridden pheasant or moth-eaten fox for next to nothing. Norman Bates liked taxidermy and Psycho was my first glimpse of taxidermy. Stuffing my mother, even as a sulky teenager, didn't appeal. I was curious about taxidermy but until recently associated it with single men, their fingers smelly with tepid entrails, trying to make a dead badger look quizzical — not an easy thing to do. A visit to Deyrolle in Paris changed all that. A shop near the Musee d'Orsay, it sells exotic butterflies and delicate stuffed birds in every colour. I realised then that taxidermy could 66 THE SPECTATOR 15 September 2007 be stylish. Only in Paris can you find dead birds to match your wallpaper.
The work of the Victorian master taxidermists Henry and Rowland Ward, Peter Spicer and James Hutchings has become very collectable. They were the first people to 'pose' animals, casing them in natural settings — they brought both realism and surrealism to the art form. The Victorians loved a bit of taxidermy and went mad for card-playing frogs and rabbits. It was also a way of preserving and transporting back the exotic animals discovered in the New World. Younger, non-creepy dealers and collectors have embraced antique taxidermy and curiosities. Buying things stuffed before the last (legitimate) war is advisable — anything post-1945 is a grey area that borders on illegality. Taxidermy can be seen in museums like the Natural History Museum in London — its collections includes animals, like the moa, that are now extinct Taxidermy can be bought at auction, with country sales being a particularly good place to find things, or from private dealers. Craig Finch from Finch & Co says, 'Buy the best you can find and afford. It must be an old piece. Condition is important. Provenance is important' I asked him what kind of people buy unusual taxidermy — something in which he specialises. 'All kinds of people buy from us.
But often they aren't hard-fast taxidermy collectors; they buy oneoff pieces. They want to make a statement with one fantastic object. They look for form and rarity.' Craig showed me the shrunken head of a 19th-century capuchin monkey — its withered face the size of a plump walnut It was too expensive and I bought a koala skull instead in a show of gothic patriotism. Emma Hawkins is another dealer from whom I've bought. She sells everything from fossilised turtle poo to a juvenile elephant skeleton. Hawkins agrees that taxidermy isn't for everyone, but thinks that it 'is the most beautiful form of natural sculpture' and that she loves people who find beauty in strange places.
There are still places where one can have animals stuffed. They are a discreet bunch and likely to be much stranger than you are — so there won't be any awkward questions about how the animal died (slipped in the shower). The Guild of Taxidermists can recommend someone to preserve your favourite or least favourite pet. I've found out Gus will be fine and won't die, yet Just for today I like my dead animals to be strangers and, on reflection, it would be weird to live with the preserved husk of a thing you loved. Taxidermy can be chic and funny and sad and interesting and is a little morbid — but it is, I think, a good kind of morbid.
HUGO BURNAND DEYROLLE www.deyrolle.fr 46 rue du Bac 75007 Paris FINCH AND CO www.finch-and-co.co.uk By appointment only Tel: +44 (0)20 7413 9937 THE GUILD OF TAXIDERMY www.taxidermy.org.uk
Previous page
