May 1, 1918

Walter Potter (July 2, 1835 to May 1, 1918) was a Victorian taxidermist. In a world where photography was new, the sense of capturing scenes against an unstopping flood of time, resulted in varieties of art wherein stuffed animals had a place. He is the subject of a new book,(Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy) but our information comes mainly from his biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Potter, from humble origins, studied nature as a child, and simply extended the usual childhood activities of collecting and studying things picked up in the woods. He early achieved fame for his tableaux of stuffed animls and supported his family displaying them for tourists. The tableaux pictured nursery rhyme and human themes as acted out by animals. There was a scene labled "The Kittens' Tea Party." Dead animals, some of which he killed, were stuffed, and arranged in human garb, and these were the main attraction of a museum centered around his work. The ODNB describes it this way:

The tableaux were the centrepieces of the museum, which also contained a miscellany of curiosities, ranging from prison leg irons to flowers from Charles Darwin's grave and a piece of the Great Wall of China. It was mostly, however, a crowded mass of natural history exhibits, including an albatross with outstretched wings, a monkey riding a goat, a giant coypu caught in the local river, and hundreds of other animals. Local farmers provided freaks of nature, including a three-legged piglet, a four-legged chicken, and several examples of kittens born with supernumerary legs and even double heads. These proved particularly popular with visitors and featured on postcards sold at the museum.

They say of Potter that he "was a quiet and kindly gentleman who spent his whole life in Bramber, where he was a churchwarden." After his death his family continued the museum, though the contents are now scattered.