Stephen Christopher Quinn: Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History.(Book review)

Stephen Christopher Quinn Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History. Abrams/AMNH, 180 pages, $40

"With its great holdings of magnificent background paintings, sculptural taxidermy, and models of unique botanical specimens, the American Museum of Natural History could be considered the Louvre of diorama art." So begins a lush new book that is a joy to behold but melancholy to contemplate. Like many of the animals depicted herein, diorama display-making is an endangered art, its extant specimens in need of their own preservation. Windows on Nature is therefore a welcome publication, part of the museum's continued efforts, in the book's own works, "to take steps to conserve and preserve these great exhibits--like their living counterparts in the wild, they are in danger of extinction."

The naturalist and artist Stephen Christopher Quinn, on staff at the American Museum since 1974, now a legend in the field, has matched photographs of the museum's famous nature dioramas, from early to mid-century, with a concise and often gripping account of their creation. Quinn explains the techniques of their construction: the curved background paintings drawn from studies in the field and transferred to paint with mathematical precision, the recreation of native flora and other scenery, and the sculpting of animals from bones, clay, and preserved hide.

The term "diorama" derived from the roots dia (through) and horao (view), was coined by Louis Daguerre in 1822. In 1889, the self-taught naturalist Carl Akeley used this style of illusionistic painting and scenery to construct the first habitat diorama. His small marshland scene of muskrats is still on display at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

By the late nineteenth century, "cycloramas featuring great battle scenes of the Civil War--utilizing both curved and painted backgrounds and three-dimensional foregrounds and figures--were making news as popular and educational forms of entertainment." It was not long before the modern museum, most notably the American Museum under Akeley, recognized the educational power of diorama display.

But who knew diorama-making could be so dangerous? In 1896, while collecting specimens for the leopard diorama, as told in Windows on Nature, one of the wounded animals charged Akeley,

 
   knocking the rifle out of Akeley's grip, and sank 
   its teeth into his upper right arm. Akeley fell on 
   top of the leopard and by working his arm free 
   of the animal's biting jaws, he was able to force 
   his right hand into the leopard's mouth and 
   down its throat while clenching it in a chokehold 
   with his left hand.... Akeley was able to 
   overpower and strangle the leopard with his 
   bare hands until, "little by little her struggling 
   ceased. My strength had outlasted hers."