Taxidermy Hummingbirds attributed to Charles Waterton dated 1820
Size: approx. 57cm x 54cm x 18cm
Description: Charles Waterton was one of the most important and eccentric figures in the nineteenth century craze for natural history, and he wrote one of the most celebrated travel books of the period -Wanderings in South America. He devised his own methods for preparing specimens and criticised many of his contemporaries for what he perceived to be the inferiority of their work. Most of his preparations date from the 1820s and 1830s so his work is considerably earlier than most of the pieces of nineteenth century taxidermy that survive today. At his death he left the vast majority of his work to his old school Stoneyhurst College, and a proportion of this has been on loan to the Wakefield Museum. Cotinga know of only one other example of his work in private hands.