The story of museum groups / [Frederic A. Lucas].

  • Frederic Augustus Lucas
Date:
[1921]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The story of museum groups / [Frederic A. Lucas]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sent a particular spot; it does depict the natural conditions under which the animals are to be found and shows them engaged in the most character¬ istic and interesting of their varied occupations. In this, the day of moving pictures, we may say that as the moving picture condenses into five minutes’ time the events of days or weeks, so these groups depict in a few square feet of space the life and happenings of a much larger area. The group in its latest form is to be found in the Museum of the University of Kansas, where it includes a great part of the Museum, a special section having been constructed to contain a large cyclorama where the various North American animals from plain to mountain and from temperate to arctic America may be viewed approximately as they would be seen in nature.1 Somewhat similar is the Laysan Island group, executed for the State University, Iowa, by Mr. Homer R. Dill, where the visitor gazes about him at the imposing assemblage of albatrosses and other sea fowl, while beyond the blue Pacific stretches to the horizon. Aside from these the bison and moose groups in this Museum, made by Richardson and Rowley, are the largest that have been made, and al¬ though they have been on exhibition for twenty-four and twenty years respectively, they compare favorably with those of to-day. The African mammals, by Mr. Carl E. Akeley, in the Field Museum, are among the finest of their kind for pose and character, but the “Four Seasons,” in the same museum and also by Mr. Akeley, depicting the Virginia deer in spring, summer, autumn and winter, represent high- water mark in this direction, combining as they do pictorial beauty with scientific accuracy of detail. It was while engaged on these groups that Air. Akeley perfected the method of making the manikin, or artificial body on which the skin is placed, so as to combine strength, lightness and durability, and also devised methods for the rapid reproduction of leaves and a compound stronger and more durable than wax. The need for making leaves in large quantities is shown by the fact that in the “Four Seasons,” the summer group alone called for seventeen thousand leaves. Such, briefly, is the story of museum groups; they have grown from the little box containing a pair of birds and a square foot or two of their immediate surroundings, to entire colonies of flamingoes and albatrosses and the broad sweep of land or sea shown in the Orizaba and Laysan groups. No one man can justly claim credit for the beauty and accuracy of such groups as may to-day be seen in our larger museums; many have contributed to this perfection and some stand preeminent among the rest. To each and all his just meed of praise. Some, whose work might irrhis prepared by and under the direction of L. L. Dyche, is an amplification of his ideas as shown in 1893 in the Kansas Building at the World’s Fair.
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