Walter Potter: The Victorian Period

The Victorian period was a golden era for taxidermy and general morbidity. Walter Potter was an English self-taught taxidermist and became famous for his intrinsic work, in which he was able to take advantage of the increasing audience for this type of art. He stuffed and preserved animals, putting them in costumes and setting them up as if they were telling a story. He was one of the pioneers in this line of work, and the period of time in which he lived couldn’t have been better for his purposes.
Preservation of beauty and fascination by death was some of Victorian people’s interests. This “feeling” became stronger after the Age of Enlightenment where the interest in natural history was growing among people, mostly from the upper class. In the video from the source cited, it is possible to see how detailed Potter’s work was. He showed his stuffed animals in different “human” …show more content…
His museum is one of the examples of the “morbid art” that Victorian society was interested in. In the short video, it is possible to see Potter’s attempt to capture life, death, cultural and social aspects of the world that surrounded him, with the whimsical element, which seemed to be the key to holding his show together and enticing people’s curiosity. Potter’s work remains, after all the years since his time, and people of different ages including children (like shown in the 1955 video) are still curious about his lifetime work. In his enterprise, he was able to keep these animals living through his taxidermist tale-telling for an undefined amount of time. In this current generation, the morbid appreciation is not as commensurate as it was in Potter’s time, but there are still people interested in seeing his projects. Walter Potter captured lives’ moments through his anthropomorphic taxidermy. This was also a way to seek an ethereal preservation of life’s beauty, creating immortal