Taxidermy & Natural History

With the antiquities market suffering from high prices and criminal scandals and a shortage of good material, it is no real surprise that collectors have turned to natural, as opposed to man-made, artefacts of greater age and, arguably, equal beauty.

THIS 75 per cent-complete shell of the extinct South American mammal known as the Glypdodont, pictured right, will be the star attraction of a highly unusual single-owner collection of ornithological and palaeontological specimens being sold by the Moulins auctioneers Enchères Sadde on October 20.

One of the more curious sections of Sotheby’s sale at Billingshurst on 21-22 May was devoted to natural, rather than man-made statuary.

Sold for £90,000 as part of the November 15 Natural History & Travel sale at Sotheby’s was an album of 162 conchological watercolours put together c.1764-82 by Mlle. J.C. Xavery, a miniaturist of Dutch descent and probably the sister of the flower and landscape painter Jacob Xavery, who was working in Paris around the same time.

UK: Some fishermen claim that pike have an appetite for human flesh – the elderly members of a crown green bowling club in Warrington say this stuffed and mounted 201b monster has been responsible for several fatalities among their anoraked colleagues in recent years.

UK: THERE is a distinctly nervous look about the Dodo pictured here, as befits a creature staring extinction in the beak. This “Facsimile of [Roelandt] Savery’s picture of the Dodo in the Royal Gallery at Berlin” is a plate from H.E. Strickland & A.G. Melville’s The Dodo and its Kindred; or the History, Affinities and Osteology of the Dodo, Solitaire and other Extinct Birds of the islands Mauritius, Rodriguez and Bourbon.

UK: The factors which make for a desirable cased fish are four-fold: the case (bowfronts are most popular), the label of a good taxidermist such as Cooper, condition and (as the joker in the pack) the beast itself.

UK: THOSE decorative pieces worked by amateurs using seashells have always come low down in the art world pecking order but of late their attractions have become more and more appreciated as seen when an Irish pair of shellwork botanical studies took £26,000 at Mallams, Oxford, on February 3.