Last May Dave and I traveled to England to research the book I’m currently working on, titled Strange Creatures: The Story of Walter Rothschild and his Museum (2011, Disney-Hyperion).
Walter Rothschild was the son of Lord Rothschild, banker to Queen Victoria. He was incredibly rich and seemed like a kid who would have had everything, but he struggled with being horribly shy. His father demanded a lot of him — yet Walter was so nervous, he could barely speak. He seems like an unlikely hero, but a hero is just what he was to me. When he was 7 years old he declared to his parents he would build a museum. He set out to collect bugs, butterflies, birds, fish, reptiles, mammals and even plants. By the time he was a late teenager, he was funding expeditions all over the world to collect animals. This was in the late 1800′s when scientists still had not discovered many of the world’s plants and animals. Walter’s father discouraged his dreams and insisted he begin work at the family banking firm, but Walter persevered and opened his museum to the public when he was 24 years old. With the help of two curators and many explorers, Walter created the largest natural history collection ever gathered by one person and furthered our understanding of the world’s animals in immense ways. I’m really enjoying bringing his story to life!
You can see how the visit to the actual museum helped in creating some of the sketches:
I’m getting pretty close to finishing the final art for the illustrations so I wanted to post a sneak peek at a couple of the paintings:
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I love the images you’ve shared. You find such interesting people to write about. I can’t wait to read this one!
Thanks Tricia. There’s an interesting connection in how I found this story. My grandparents (who were ornithologists) where great friends with Ernst Mayr, the evolutionary biologist, who worked many years at the American Museum of Natural History (in New York) and then at Harvard. In 1927 Mayr was sent to New Guinea by Walter Rothschild to collect bird species. There were rumors that Mayr had been killed — not many people traveled into New Guinea back then. But the rumors were false and he eventually returned and became curator of bird specimens at the American Museum of Natural History where he acquired Rothschild’s enormous collection of bird skins.