PITTSBURGH (AP) - He’s got one second - maybe two - to save himself.
All his training, all his life’s experience and skill will be tested in this one moment.
It’s to be, or not to be - frozen for 150 years in a diorama popularly known as “Arab Courier Attacked by Lions.”
That it’s a lion, mid-lunge, that’s upon him. that his camel mount is going down. that he’s got nothing but a dagger to defend himself. those are the exotic details.
He is us. We sense it.
“The visual drama is stopping you in your tracks,” says Erin Peters, assistant curator of science and research at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
The courier’s uncertain fate has transfixed generations of Pittsburghers. He transfixed New Yorkers before that. He made the throngs pause in 1876 Philadelphia at the Centennial Exposition, and in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1867.
The world comes after us all.
Of course we’re safe from actual lions, here in the city, but this taxidermied fright whispers our “civilized” routines will not protect us.
Death’s so close he can feel its breath.
Hamlet contemplates Yorick in the boneyard.
The world comes for us, and how we meet it determines our fate and our fame.
We know from old photos the courier stared his full-on.
But we now also know - thanks to CT scans and X-rays - that he is more than a mannequin. Under the brown pigments, beneath the sculpted plaster, behind those hazel glass eyes is a real human skull.
Alas, we know not whose.
We know nothing of his life - if he was a funny-man or warrior - only his fate as art after death.
His skull was almost certainly stolen, but again, we know not where.
We can guess by whom.
Jules and Eduard Verreaux, heirs to Maison Verreaux, one of the most famous taxidermy supply houses in 19th Century France, from a young age learned the dead of other lands could fetch a price back home.
Jules was just 11 years old in 1818 when he accompanied his uncle Pierre to South Africa to collect “specimens.” Although the family business primarily trafficked in exotic birds and animals, the 131,405 specimens they brought back two years later included “human skulls of Hottentots, Namaquas and Bushmen, and nearly two dozen skeletons unearthed from an old Cape Town cemetery and from the Grahamstown battlefield of 1819.”
A decade later, Jules was back in South Africa - with his younger brother Eduard. He wrote to his anatomy teacher, the legendary zoologist George Cuvier, director of the Museum of Natural History in Paris and a customer of Maison Verreaux, to let him know something special was on its way: He’d dug up the fresh corpse of a Botsawana man and stuffed it.
“In order to get it, I was obliged to disinter it at night in places guarded by his fellows,” Jules wrote.
While it was unusual to stuff a human, the young man’s grave-robbing was in no way exceptional; rather, it was considered professional. This was the beginning of the long era of “scientific collection,” of colonizing Europeans and Americans digging up the bones of native peoples and shipping them to city museums where experts propounded the superiority of the white race.
Grave scavenging was a mark of civilization.
More than 50 years later, famed anthropologist Franz Boas would admit: “It is most unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave, but what is the use, someone has to do it.”
Mary Shelley’s doctor was of a type.
It was Eduard - not Jules - who turned our man’s skull into the “courier.”
Perhaps it was one of the skulls brought back from their collecting trips that had not sold and was still laying about the office. It could also be the skull of a Parisian, filched from the catacombs or acquired from the dissection table of a university anatomist.
We just don’t know.
But why?
The “World’s Fair” of 1867 was going to be a highly competitive international showcase of the best in France. The courier and his camel and lions were not entered as taxidermy - Eduard stuffed a single lion for that, to great acclaim - rather, they were entered in what we would now consider decorative arts.
“I believe Eduard Verreaux was going to prove to the world that taxidermy was an art form that could compete: in relevance, drama and popularity,” says Louise Lippincott, Curator of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
She refers to the diorama as “a large sculpture, with fur.”
Like the Orientalist paintings of Eugene Delacroix and bronzes of Antoine-Louis Bayre from which the diorama borrows, a human figure was “required to raise it to high art,” Lippincott says.
An actual human, though?
Eduard may not have given it much thought; then again, he may not have had the skill to accomplish his goal any other way.
As Carnegie conservator Gretchen Anderson says: “It’s why the human face is as accurate as it is.”
Accurate and affective.
“It was created to show the mastery of the creator,” says Erin Peters. “The drama is the vehicle by which the viewer can appreciate the taxidermist’s mastery, and it absolutely does that.”
Eduard, master and creator, was dead the following year.
On this side of the Atlantic, his death presented an “unexampled opportunity” - the impetus to create the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The founders raised money, sailed to France, purchased Eduard’s collection - including our courier - and brought it to America “to establish a museum that would compare to those of Europe.”
But the Verreaux legacy would propagate wider ripples through American culture.
Henry Ward - an American naturalist who had studied in Paris - opened a taxidermy supply business in Rochester, New York, modeled on Maison Verreaux. He recruited Jules Bailly, who’d spent years working for Jules and Eduard. Bailly in turn trained a number of Americans who - like the Verreaux brothers - would travel the world for specimens and transform both taxidermy and museums. Among them was William T. Hornaday, who would become chief taxidermist for the Smithsonian and eventually director of the Bronx Zoo.
It was in Singapore in 1878 that Hornaday, who had just returned from four months of specimen collecting in Borneo, met Pittsburgh industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Their conversation resulted in Carnegie purchasing a tiger skin rug and agreeing to take Hornaday’s pet orangutan to Ceylon where he shipped it to the Duke of Buckingham in India. It may have been Hornaday who gave Carnegie the idea of creating a museum of his own.
When Carnegie did, he hired Hornaday’s Rochester colleague, another Jules Bailly protégée named Frederick Webster, as chief taxidermist.
And it was Webster who refurbished our courier diorama when it arrived in Pittsburgh from New York in 1899.
The man inside our courier never really escaped the influence of the Verreaux who stole his skull and transformed him.
“The diorama is bound up in the history of Empire,” says Neil Doshi, assistant professor of French at the University of Pittsburgh.
Whoever he was, he became something else, draped in a hodgepodge of clothing styles to make him look like they thought a “North African Arab” should, and portrayed like the lions: noble, fierce and savage.
Whoever is inside, his skull “is a part of the object now,” says museum director Eric Dorfman.
Human remains displayed as art is not unknown in Europe.
Dorfman points to the Katakombenheiligen, skeletons discovered in Roman catacombs in 1578, believed to be Christian martyrs, and subsequently shipped to churches in Germany and surrounding countries that had lost the remains of their saints in the reformation and where the skulls were bejeweled and arrayed in gold.
There’s a certain artistry to the arrangement of bones in the catacombs of Paris.
And the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic features bones as Baroque decoration, including a coat of arms, garlands of skulls and a massive candelabra of pelvic bones, long bones and skulls.
Most recently, the plasticized bodies of the Body Worlds exhibits draw thousands.
“We are fascinated by death,” says Dorfman.
When the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit, ’Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake’ closed in 2014, it had attracted nearly nine million visitors.
The Mutter Museum, famous for dissecting the Siamese twins Chang and Eng and putting them on display, is now the most-visited small museum in Philadelphia, attracting more than 130,000 visitors a year.
Our courier, consistently the second most popular exhibit behind Dippy the dinosaur at the Carnegie Museum, will undoubtedly continue to draw crowds.
People still will be transfixed by the art.
They still will ask who will win, man or lion?
But they also will ask other, more troubling questions.
What of the skull?
What of the man?
Erin Peters says his continued display is an opportunity for the museum to “take on difficult knowledge.” The exhibit acknowledges now its Orientalist foundations - and what’s inside.
And there’s another difference.
In its various travels and refurbishments, our courier’s gaze had shifted downward over time: he was no longer making eye-contact with the big cat attacking him.
Conservators righted that.
Our courier - whoever he is - once again stares his fate full-on.
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Sources:
- Personal communication with Erin Peters, Joint Lecturer and Assistant Curator, Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Museum of Natural History and with Gretchen Anderson, Conservator, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
- “Design, Display, and Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs,” unpublished lecture by Peter Clericuzio, Visiting Lecturer, Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, 2017.
- “Orientalism, Naturally: Revisiting the Arab Courier and the Barbary Lions,” unpublished lecture by Neil Doshi, Assistant Professor of French, Department of French and Italian, University of Pittsburgh, 2017.
- “Diverse Perspectives: Human Remains and Natural History Museums at Home and Abraod,” unpublished lecture by Eric Dorfman, Director, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 2017.
- “Window into the wild” by By Julie Hannon, Carnegie magazine, Summer 2016, p.19
- The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals, by William T. Hornaday, 1922.
- “Lions and Dromedaries: Middle East Meets Wild West,” unpublished lecture by Louise Lippincott, Curator of Fine Arts, Carnegie Museum of Art, 2017.
- “More notes on the Verreaux brothers,” by Miquel Molina, Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies, col. 16 (2002) no. 1, p. 30-36
- “The East as Subject: Knowledge and Power in Middle Eastern Studies,” unpublished lecture by Luke Matthew Peterson, Lecturer in History, Arabic and Global Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2017.
- The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing, by Rachel Poliquin, Penn State University Press, 2012.
- Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, by Samuel J. Redman, Harvard University Press, 2016.
- “Taxidermy of Lion Attacking Dromedary: a History of Methods and Provenance,” unpublished lecture by Stephen Rogers, Collection Manager of Birds and Herpetology, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 2017.
- “Science Behind the Mammals in Lion Attacking a Dromedary,” unpublished lecture by John R. Wible, Curator of Mammals, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 2017.
- New York Times, 23 December 1877.
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Online:
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Information from: Tribune-Review, https://triblive.com
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