An 18th-century rhinoceros is the star of a new exhibition at the Barber Institute in Birmingham, UK, and of a lavishly illustrated catalogue with the intriguing title, Miss Clara and the Celebrity Beast in Art 1500-1860.
‘Jungfer Clara’ (‘Miss Clara’, so christened while visiting Würzburg, Germany, in 1748, although nobody seems to know why) was a young female rhinoceros shipped from Bengal to Rotterdam in 1741 by an enterprising Dutch sea captain, Douwe Mout van der Meer. He then took her on a tour of European cities. It took eight horses to draw her specially made wooden carriage from Brussels to Venice, Paris to Prague, Rome to Warsaw, and finally to London – where she died in 1758. She was fed on bread, beer, and cartloads of hay, and her thick leathery skin was kept moist with liberal applications of fish oil.
At each destination, kings, queens, courtiers, and commoners flocked to see her, and her fame generated a massive industry in souvenirs and imagery, from life-scale paintings and sculptures by major artists to cheap popular prints; there were also Clara-inspired clocks, pots, and medals, and even hairstyles modelled on her horn.
Analysing ancestry and ancient agriculture