tenthousandlux: The Hummingbird Cabinet

Nineteenth century hummingbird cabinet, Natural History Museum, London

I have gone back to visit this Victorian hummingbird case many times since I first saw it several years ago. It is definitely an object of curiosity - head-turning, interesting - but weird and a little creepy: a glass case about one and a half meters wide filled with over a hundred stuffed hummingbirds and their little nests. I knew that taxidermy was a big thing in the 19th century and reflected the discoveries being made at the time of the natural world, but through a little research I learned that people were really crazy for hummingbirds and often had them stuffed and displayed on branches or in hoards - as the case above.

Historian Judith Pascoe argues in her book on collectors of the Romantic-era (c. 1820 - 1900) that stuffed hummingbirds epitomized the Romantic longing for the fleeting and ephemeral - their infatuation with the beauty of loss and the sublime helps to explain their aesthetic appreciation of dead birds. (Crack open your Byron and Shelley, people. Smoke a little opium and pine away all day on a chaise lounge.)

"No sounds emerge from their thousands of beaks, but these birds provide mute testimony to their collectors' insatiable longings, romantic desires fueled by the impossibility of fulfillment. The hummingbirds have staved off death with their arsenic-laden stuffing and survived to epitomize the romantic pursuit of perfect and permanent beauty."

I've taken lots of pictures of this case - they never compare to being in front of it - the hundreds of tiny beady eyes or the dustiness of the feathers, the variety of species. When I step back, I see a feathered version of the Last Judgment - the same visual pattern, all the little souls going up to heaven or down to hell - ideas of death and resurrection (okay, here it is more preservation), the memento mori aspect of taxidermy and my own finite life - and I think that is what I find the most beautiful and the most disturbing and why I keep going back to see these stuffed birds.