The History of Taxidermy: From Victorian Parlors to Horror Icons
Quick Answer
What is the history of taxidermy? Taxidermy is the practice of preserving, stuffing, and mounting animal skins so the animal appears lifelike. The word was coined in 1820 by French naturalist Louis Dufresne, but the practice goes back at least to ancient Egypt, where animals were mummified by the millions as religious offerings. In 19th century Europe, taxidermy became both a natural history science and a popular art form, reaching its strangest peak with Victorian rogue taxidermists who staged dead animals in human scenes. The practice later became directly connected to real-world horror through Ed Gein, whose techniques influenced three separate fictional villains. Today, taxidermy is experiencing a revival as fine art and goth aesthetic.
Walter Potter spent 40 years teaching dead animals to have tea parties. The kittens attended a wedding. The rabbits went to school. The squirrels smoked pipes and played poker. The Victorians drove hours to see it and called it charming. That is the normal part of this history.
The word "taxidermy" comes from Greek. Taxis: arrangement. Derma: skin. Louis Dufresne, a French naturalist at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, coined it in 1820 to describe what he did for a living: preparing and mounting animal skins so the creature appeared alive. The practice is older than the word by several thousand years.
The Egyptians were doing it first
Egypt produced tens of millions of animal mummies. Cats were the most common. Also ibis, baboons, crocodiles, dogs, and eels. The mummies were not display pieces. They were religious offerings, sacrificed to gods who took animal form and buried in sacred catacombs by the millions. Excavations at Saqqara in the 1800s uncovered such overwhelming quantities of mummified cats that European ship captains bought them by the ton to use as ballast. Some were exported to England and ground into agricultural fertilizer. The formal archaeological record of this period is not good.
The techniques were different from modern taxidermy but the problem was the same: how do you stop a dead thing from rotting? The Egyptians used natron salt, resins, and linen wrapping. It worked well enough that their animals are still recognizable two thousand years later, which is more than most modern taxidermists can claim about work from the 1700s.
Wunderkammern and the birth of natural history
In 16th and 17th century Europe, wealthy collectors assembled Wunderkammern, or "wonder rooms": private museums built before public museums existed. Taxidermied animals sat alongside fossils, minerals, ethnographic objects, scientific instruments, and things nobody could identify or explain. The point was to display everything the world contained in one room. The natural history museum grew directly from these collections.
The early taxidermy in these rooms was terrible. Animals were stuffed with rags, moss, and sand. Skins split and shrank. Eyes were carved wood or mismatched glass beads. A mounted lion from the 17th century looks like a very sad golden retriever. Techniques improved by necessity when institutions needed specimens to last not years but centuries. By the mid-1700s, European naturalists were developing better methods for treating hides, constructing interior frameworks, and setting glass eyes that would hold their position. The animals started looking like animals.
Walter Potter and the Victorian golden age
Walter Potter was born in 1835 in Bramber, Sussex. He became a publican. He had no formal artistic training of any kind. At 19, he built a small tableau of his dead pet robin based on a nursery rhyme called "The Death and Burial of Cock Robin." He kept building for 60 more years.
His finished museum eventually contained hundreds of anthropomorphic scenes. "The Kittens' Wedding": 20 taxidermied kittens in wedding attire at an altar. "The Rabbits' School": 20 rabbits seated at tiny desks with books. "The Death and Burial of Cock Robin": a full funeral scene with 98 birds, each species accurately placed in the role described by the poem. The museum attracted over 100,000 visitors a year at its peak in the late 1800s.
The Victorians had a high tolerance for death and enormous respect for craft. Potter's work was both technically skilled and obviously constructed from dead things, and nobody treated this as a contradiction. When the museum finally closed in 2003, 35 lots went to auction. The buyers included interior decorators, fine art collectors, and at least one well-documented rock band.
The preserved pet and the mourning industry
Victorian England codified grief in ways no culture before it had attempted. There were rules for how long you mourned, what colors you wore, who you were permitted to speak to. The culture that produced jet jewelry, hair lockets, and mourning portraiture also produced taxidermied pets in glass display cases. We covered how deep that whole industry went in the Victorian mourning culture post. The preserved pet was not strange. It was love. It was refusing to let the thing be gone.
The demand created a taxidermy trade that extended far beyond natural history museums. Every substantial town had a taxidermist. Animals were preserved as hunting trophies, scientific specimens, ornamental objects, and grief given permanent form. The industry peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. By the early 20th century it had contracted sharply, partly because tastes changed and partly because the supply of large game was contracting along with the empires that had provided it.
Ed Gein
Ed Gein was arrested in Plainfield, Wisconsin in November 1957. What police found in his farmhouse took days to catalog. Bowls made from human skulls. Lampshades made from human faces. Furniture upholstered in human skin. A vest constructed from a female torso, with breasts attached, designed to be worn. He had been visiting local graves for years, digging up recently buried women and bringing them home.
Grave robbing to supply anatomy schools and medical colleges had been an organized industrial trade in Britain a century earlier. Burke and Hare were making a business of it in Edinburgh in the 1820s before they started supplying fresh bodies instead of exhumed ones. We covered that whole system in the body snatching post. Gein was using the same techniques, alone, in 1957 Wisconsin, for reasons that had nothing to do with science.
Technically, he was a taxidermist. That is the accurate word for what he was doing with human remains: arranging skin. He inspired Norman Bates in Psycho (1960). He inspired Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). He inspired Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Three separate iconic horror figures from one actual person. Hollywood has been mining Ed Gein for material for 65 years and has not run out yet.
Rogue taxidermy
In 2004, three Minneapolis artists founded the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists. They were not interested in recreating what had been alive. They were making things that had never existed. Mermaids built from squirrels and fish. Pegasus from horses. Jackalopes, which had existed in American folk culture as a joke since the 1930s, now constructed from actual taxidermied animals with actual antlers mounted on actual rabbit skulls.
The movement grew alongside death-positive and goth communities. Taxidermied animals started appearing on Etsy, in high-end gallery shows, in editorial fashion spreads. Weekend taxidermy workshops opened in Brooklyn, London, and Portland. The Victorian pub owner who staged kitten weddings had descendants. They just had better branding.
The skill itself never changed. You take a dead animal. You arrange its skin. The question of what you're trying to say with the arrangement just got bigger. Walter Potter died in 1918 without having fully answered it. His kittens have been at the altar for 150 years.
Ed Gein inspired three horror icons. One of them put on the most quotable scene in 1990s cinema. The Buffalo Bill's Body Lotion T-Shirt is in the shop, along with the rest of the gothic collection.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the history of taxidermy?
Taxidermy as a named practice was coined in 1820 by French naturalist Louis Dufresne, but the preservation of animal remains for religious, decorative, or scientific purposes goes back at least to ancient Egypt, which produced tens of millions of mummified animals over several thousand years. European natural history collections systematized the craft in the 16th through 18th centuries. The Victorian era produced both the greatest technical advances in taxidermy and its strangest cultural expressions, including elaborately staged scenes of anthropomorphic animals. In the 20th century, taxidermy became associated with hunting trophies and horror, and in the 21st it has been reclaimed as fine art.
Who invented taxidermy?
The word "taxidermy" was coined in 1820 by Louis Dufresne, a French naturalist working at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. But the practice of preserving and mounting animal specimens developed gradually across multiple cultures over centuries. Ancient Egyptians mummified animals for religious purposes. European naturalists and collectors developed formal mounting techniques from the 16th century onward. No single person invented the craft. Dufresne gave it a name.
What is rogue taxidermy?
Rogue taxidermy is a contemporary art movement that uses taxidermy techniques to create fantastical creatures that never existed: mermaids made from squirrels and fish, pegasus figures, elaborate jackalopes, and hybrid animals from multiple species. The Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists was founded in 2004 by artists Sarina Brewer, Scott Bibus, and Robert Marbury, who distinguished their work from traditional taxidermy by removing the obligation to recreate a real animal. The movement has grown significantly since the 2010s, with rogue taxidermy appearing in fine art galleries and gaining a substantial following in goth and death-positive communities.
Did Ed Gein do taxidermy?
Ed Gein, arrested in 1957 in Plainfield, Wisconsin, used techniques that closely parallel taxidermy: specifically the preservation and repurposing of human skin. He exhumed bodies from local cemeteries and used the remains to construct household objects and garments, including a vest designed to be worn. He is technically and accurately described as a taxidermist of human remains, though that framing does not appear in his legal proceedings or in most historical accounts. He directly inspired three separate fictional horror characters: Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill.
Why is taxidermy popular in goth culture?
Taxidermy sits at the intersection of several things goth culture has always engaged with: death aesthetics, Victorian history, the macabre made beautiful, and collecting objects that mainstream culture finds disturbing. The preserved animal is a physical encounter with death that is also craft, also art, and also decorative. The rogue taxidermy movement specifically overlaps with goth and death-positive communities because it treats death materials as creative raw material without sentimentality or horror. For communities that have spent years normalizing engagement with mortality, taxidermy is a logical extension.
What did Walter Potter make?
Walter Potter (1835-1918) was a self-taught English taxidermist who created elaborate anthropomorphic scenes using taxidermied animals. His most famous works include "The Kittens' Wedding," featuring 20 kittens in wedding attire; "The Rabbits' School," showing 20 rabbits at desks; and "The Death and Burial of Cock Robin," a 98-bird funeral scene based on a nursery rhyme. His museum in Bramber, Sussex attracted over 100,000 visitors annually at its peak. The collection was dispersed at auction in 2003 after the museum closed.
