17

Portraits of Extinction: Encountering Bluebuck Narratives in the Natural History Museum 1

Dolly Jørgensen

Its snout is brightly illuminated against the stark black background. Its eyes reflect the light bouncing off the glass. It looks more grey than blue, but perhaps it would look more blue under a radiant sun, running across the plains. But it cannot run. It cannot even move—it is just a skin stretched out and mounted to resemble its former self. Of course, that makes it a perfect subject for a portrait; a portrait of extinction.

The taxidermied bluebuck (Hippotragus leucophaeus) I encountered at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN) in Paris, France, is one of only four in the world. The bluebuck, an African antelope, was a victim of white colonization of the continent, only described by Western science in 1766 and extirpated by around 1800. The particular specimen on display is a portrait of the bluebuck—a remnant of a species which is long gone. Bluebucks exist only as representations of bluebucks.

Portraiture is an art form that takes on the Herculean task of revealing both the outside of an object or person and claiming to represent its internal essence.2 The portrait prompts the viewer to use her imagination to imagine the context beyond what is pictured—to visualize the world that the subject lived in. The portrait, then, both reveals directly and hints obliquely at its world.

Portraits are not reserved for individuals. As anyone who has appreciated Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (1434) or Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642) will know, portraits can also be a group affair. Whether there is one subject in the frame or several, Catherine Soussloff has argued that portraits are “pictures particularly indicative not only of an individual, but also of kinship and social status.” 3 Portraits are about connections.

While art historians employ the term “portraiture” when discussing the representation of a person (or persons) in artistic form like a painting or sculpture, in this chapter I apply the concept of portraiture to animals in museums. This is not as great of a stretch as one might suppose. As scholars of taxidermy practice have demonstrated, considerable artistic skill goes into crafting animals put on display.4 The taxidermy process involves separating skin from body, treating the skin to avoid decomposition and degradation, shaping a replacement body frame, replacing soft parts like noses and eyes, and then putting it all together into a thing that resembles the animal it once was. The physical body of the once-living animal is one element in the portrait, but it is not the whole image. When put on display, more things are added in the way of stands, labels, and cases—these identifying elements correspond well to practices in early modern portraiture which included names and even biographical stories on the canvas or the frame into which the art work has been placed. Because museums often have only one specimen of a species (particularly when specimens are rare, as they are with extinct species), a particular animal body on display with all of these accoutrements becomes a portrayal of the species as a whole.

Animal portraits encapsulate stories. As Samuel Alberti has argued, looking at museum objects allows us to see “relationships between people and people, between objects and objects, and between objects and people. We encounter not only collectors, curators, and scientists but also visitors and audiences. In this conception, the museum becomes a vessel for the bundle of relationships enacted through each of the thousands of specimens on display and in store.”5 The choices made for the display—from which specimens are collected to which specimens are selected for display to what positions animals are mounted in—all enact relationships.6

For environmental historians, this means that the museum is a place within which we can investigate the multi-faceted relationships of people and objects over time, including how stories of the past are communicated today. Environmental and animal historians have rarely engaged with natural history museums as places of environmental storytelling, although these museums include rich textual and physical material for analysis.7 As Jay Young observes in Chapter 16 of this volume, “creating an animal exhibit demands narrative choices,” and these choices deserve scrutiny. Historians of science and museum studies scholars, on the other hand, have been quite interested in the cultural contexts of natural history exhibitions, as well as tracing the histories of specimen acquisition.8 There is an unexplored space of inquiry around how (and if) museums communicate animal histories—the historical interactions of animals as both individuals and species with others—in addition to typical displays of “natural history” which focus on the biological traits of animals and evolutionary development.

Because collected animal bodies are historical artifacts—and in the case of extinct animals, irreplaceable artifacts—when they are put on display they become interpretations of history. The history that is told in these public spaces does not come from an individual specimen alone; rather, it comes through relations in the museum, as noted by Alberti. A room with animals in glass cases is an archive of animal bodies, but it is also an archive of animal portraits. These portraits capture animals that can exist in our present only as representations. How each portrait is painted in our minds will matter to how we imagine them as they once were.

In this chapter I will examine three portraits of the bluebuck, one created by the MNHN in Paris, one by the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet (NRM) in Stockholm, and one by Naturalis in Leiden to see how animals displayed in the archive of the natural history museum can narrate extinction. The fourth extant taxidermied bluebuck (and the only female specimen) is owned by the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, but it is not on display, so it has not been included.9 I am not writing an object biography of these specimens—although that could be done by examining how they were collected, treated, mounted, and displayed over time—but rather examining how they are shown to the visitor, frozen at one moment in time as a portrait of extinction.10

My method is one of encounter with the animal through display practices. The encounter with the museum specimen is an encounter with a physical object—a physical trace of an animal that once was living—in a specific context. Natural history museums have a long history of display practices, which involve putting animal remains in front of visitors.11 Both in the collection of an object and its display, messages are communicated to the audience. As Hilde Hein observed, “[m]useums are actually warehouses of material things only superficially. At bottom they have always been reservoirs of meaning.”12 The representational practices of animals in museums—which animals are put on display and how they are displayed—connect (or disconnect) humans from those animals.13 Museums are media spaces that create interaction between the audiences and the displays as well as among the visitors themselves.14 In order to unpack the representational practices, meaning making, and media messiness of the exhibition of animal bodies, I adopt a critically situated, place-based, lived-experience method, which Duncan Grewcock has advocated for in museum studies.15 The encounter with animal traces in the museum is a process—it unfolds through interaction and emotion. In this chapter I take the reader with me through this process of seeing bluebuck portraits.

Portrait 1: In Light and Darkness

The bluebuck (hippotrague bleu in French) at MNHN stands in a gallery dedicated to extinct and endangered animals. All of the glass cases are constructed with black frames, black backgrounds, and black bottom coverings. The labels are black with white print. Parts of the animals, especially the faces, are eerily illuminated with spotlights. The bodies are not evenly lighted and there is minimal ambient lighting in the room.

This technique of accentuating the difference between light and dark is known in art history as chiaroscuro. One of chiaroscuro’s manifestations appeared in Dutch seventeenth-century paintings as the nocturnal scene lit by candlelight.16 In these paintings, such as Dominicus van Tol’s Boy with a Mousetrap by Candlelight (ca. 1664–65) and Gerrit Dou’s Old Woman at a Window with a Candle (1671),17 the candle makes the subject’s face glow and slightly illuminates the surroundings to give a sense of the objects in the room. Working by candlelight stressed the virtue of using diligently one’s mortal time, which can be snuffed out like a candle.18 Rather than being portraits of a specific person, these seventeenth-century genre paintings depicted scenes of everyday life.19 There are, however, serious limitations to reading genre paintings as historically accurate representations of the past; as noted by Wayne Franits, architecture, clothing, and other details in genre paintings can be inaccurate or incongruent with contemporary practice.20

The chiaroscuro portrait of extinction of the bluebuck created in the MNHN gallery draws the viewer into the details: the hairs lining up to follow the body’s contours, the ridges on the horns repeating their pattern, the eyelids creating a double frame around the glass eye. But more than simply aesthetic, the chiaroscuro technique stresses the fleeting nature of life illuminated in this light. The label next to the body gives it historicity: the bluebuck “was one of the first African mammal victims of the colonization of southern Africa. A small fearful animal, it was easy to hunt for meat, usually intended to feed dogs.”21 Life was fleeting for the bluebuck, which was not fleet of foot.

The room is filled with similar stories of the end: the New Caledonian rail that was “without a doubt the victim of hunting and animals introduced by humans”; the quagga that suffered “intensive hunting”; the Carolina parakeet whose extinction was “accelerated by hunting to supply the feather trade”; the passenger pigeon “relentlessly hunted”; and the great bustard that was “exterminated by hunters” in France. “Victim” is a word that appears in many of the labels, stressing the one-sided power relationship between human and animal in these cases. There is an underlying irony in these laments of hunting, which not only brought about the extinction of the species in question but also supplied the body now on display.

Although the gallery of extinct and endangered species at the MNHN contains many bodies and many stories, the chiaroscuro techniques make each appear to stand alone. The visitor is drawn to each body partly illuminated by light while partly concealed in dark. Yet these individual portraits speak to the same widespread phenomenon. They become genre portraits, a type that is repeated over and over again with the same aesthetic and the same basic message. It is a missive recounting the candles snuffed out too soon. Visitors are left in that darkness of extinction, with the anticipation that even those species on display that are not yet extinct soon will be.

Portait 2: Family Resemblances

Sweden’s bluebuck (blåbock in Swedish) stands in a wall case near a corner on the first floor of the NRM. At its feet is a mounted thylacine and a small pile of Hawaiian tree snails. The bluebuck looks toward the adjacent corner case containing the extinct bird specimens: great auk, Mauritius starling, ivory billed woodpecker, passenger pigeon, huia, Cuban macaw, great moa (only a leg bone), and copy of an elephant bird egg.

Displays in natural history museums organize their specimens according to various principles. One way is taxonomic: all the birds together, all the land mammals together, all the marine mammals together, etc. The Naturhistorisches Museum Wien and the Natural History Museum in London follow this principle so that animals of the same type appear in the same galleries. Another common organization strategy is geographic. For example, the American Museum of Natural History in New York has a Hall of New York State Environment and a Hall of Ocean Life, both of which mix animals from taxonomic categories in order to show environmental connections. A third organizational principle is functional. The Horniman Museum and Gallery near London, for example, does this by grouping some animals with similar properties, such as wings (birds, bats, insects), and grouping others to show evolutionary variation, such as skeletal form.

The NRM has grouped the bluebuck along with the thylacine, Hawaiian snail, great auk, and others together because of one similarity: they are all extinct. This serves as a functional type or organization, like wings or hooves. These specimens make up a family of things related to one another through their non-existence. This kind of grouping—the extinct animal case—is a tactic used in other museums as well. For example, the Royal Albert Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter, UK, has one case in a wildlife room where they have collected all of their extinct birds and insects. But this is by no means the most common strategy: many museums spread out their extinct specimens into other groupings, such as the extinct birds in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, which are found randomly alongside common species, and the thylacine at the Smithsonian placed alongside existing Australian animals.

An understated sign inside the case near the bluebuck’s back foot declares: “Displayed here are examples of extinct specimens. Some of them have been wiped out by humans, others due to natural causes.”22 But there is no indication of how each particular species died out, so the viewer is left to wonder if natural or man-made causes were in play for each. The bluebuck label only tells us that “the last bluebucks were killed in South Africa in 1800,” a vague statement that is quite different from the MNHN one. The thylacine label likewise notes the last capture of a thylacine in the wild in 1933 and the presence of one in a zoo until 1936, but nothing is said about the deliberate program of extermination that brought about their extermination.23 On the other hand, the great auk label does mention that the bird was “easy prey since it lacked the ability to fly,” and the Cuban parrot story notes that it was “heavily hunted and young were captured as caged birds.”

In a nearby display case, there is a grouping of species threatened with extinction. On this display’s label, there is no doubt about the anthropogenic nature of extinction: “During the past 400 years, humans have drastically altered most of Earth’s habitats. As a result, species are becoming rapidly extinct.” An asp (a European freshwater fish), a Galapagos tortoise, and a gyrfalcon, among others, appear in this case. This group is related to the animals in the extinction case—there is an implication that they might have to be moved over in the future from the status of endangered to extinct. But they are a separate and distinct group at the moment—endangered is one thing and extinct is something else. This makes the presentation quite different from the MNHN room, which mixes endangered and extinct species haphazardly.

The mode of displaying extinction at NRM stresses kinship and status, as Soussloff pointed out is common in portraits.24 Although they have individual labels, the specimens are not highlighted as individuals in spotlights; instead, they are associated visually and textually with each other. This gives them cohesion and provides extinction with a sense of scale at a glance. Yet unlike the MNHN display, which evokes strong emotional reactions with its chiaroscuro style, the NRM group portrait is rather flat with its evenly lit specimens standing in teal coloured cases with small off-white labels. The bluebuck is presented as an unremarkable member of the group called “extinct.” Putting it together in this group creates an extinction family portrait.

Portrait 3: Pixelated encounters

RMNH.MAM.20681.b

This is my initial digital encounter with RMNH.MAM.20681.b, the bluebuck held by Naturalis in Leiden.25 Because this specimen is not on display in Leiden, the only way to see it without a special storage visit is to visit it online. Information about this animal has been entered into the BioPortal database, which catalogues Naturalis’ holdings.26 Here, the bluebuck has been converted into metadata: its scientific name, specimen number, sex, preparation, etc.

Even something as dry and potentially uninviting as the BioPortal tells a story. Literary scholar Ursula Heise has written about the construction of environmental narratives through databases like this one.27 A key piece of information in this flood of data is that this specimen is the lectotype, which means that this individual is considered to be the representative specimen for the whole species of Hippotragus leucophaeus. The earliest known full-body image of a bluebuck, published in 1778 in G. L. le Clerc Comte de Buffon’s Historie naturelle, générale et particulière and drawn by J. Allamand, was based on this museum specimen.28 The database records “type status” because it gives the specimen a particular role for the scientific community. Any future newly-discovered suspected bluebuck specimens would be compared to this one to determine their legitimacy. Interestingly, there is no metadata for the species status; that is, there is no way to search the database for all “extinct” things, and there is nothing in the record that would tell an uninformed viewer that the animal was extinct. The database’s narrative is not deliberately a story of extinction, although the reason I have found the specimen is because of its extinction.

After the metadata presentation, twelve photographs are linked to the RMNH.MAM.201681.b entry. These photographs together give a complete view of the specimen, including two whole body shots and close-ups of the head, neck, sides, legs, and rump. This photographic specimen display offers a view that the specimens described above do not: it allows the viewer to see all sides of the animal. In the museum cases in Paris and Stockholm, only one side of the bluebuck is visible—the other side faces the back wall of the case and thus is hidden from view. The Leiden images can be combined, at least mentally, into a 3D experience of the animal.29

Because each of these images is downloadable in high resolution (12 megapixels), as a viewer I can zoom in tightly. Using the fourth image on the second row, for example, I can see the individual hairs in the ears, the defined horn ridges, and even the holes and stitches in the skin created by the taxidermy process (Figure 17.4). This means that I can see details that are not visible if the specimen were standing in front of me behind glass.30 A more intimate portrait of the bluebuck is available through this digital tool than in a museum gallery.

I am reminded by this viewing of the bluebuck about the PixCell series of artworks by Kohei Nawa. Nawa covers taxidermied animals found for sale online with variably sized beads to represent the pixels that the animal was first viewed as. As the artist says in a statement about his work, the PixCells produce “a magnifying and distorting lens effect occurring over all cell units.”31 When I encountered Nawa’s works (two deer in different museum exhibits), the PixCells had indeed converted object into pixels, some of which were zoomed-in areas highlighting only a few hairs as if under a microscope. There is an uncanny feeling of seeing the animal parts very close-up while at the same time seeing the animal whole. This is precisely what the digital photographs of the Dutch bluebuck do. The pixilation allows the creation of a portrait at different zoom levels simultaneously.

Encountering a digital animal is not identical to encountering one as a physical object, but it is no less authentic an encounter. As environmental historian Finn Arne Jørgensen has argued, experiencing wildlife and environments through digital means is mediated by technology, but so is every other environmental encounter because technology always operates as a mediator of human experience of nature.32 My encounters with the bluebucks at MNHN and NRM were also mediated by the glass of the cases, the labels next to them, the room’s structures, and more. The museum database is no less an animal archive than the museum gallery.

Possibilities (and Limitations) of Extinction Portraits

At the beginning of this chapter, I noted that modern portraiture claims to present and represent both the external form of an object or person and its internal essence. How well do these three portraits of the bluebuck measure up?

They all represent the external form of the animal in that they all show a specimen that has been prepared to look like the bluebuck as it was when it was alive—or at least what someone thought it looked like when it was alive. The bluebuck specimens do look like the earliest drawings of the species, but that is not because the taxidermists did a good job; it is because the artist did: the earliest drawings were made from the prepared specimen, not the other way around. As far as we know the artists who produced the eighteenth-century drawings of bluebucks while they were still alive never saw one. Some of the taxidermy has stood the test of time more than others—both the Stockholm and Leiden specimens show their seams clearly. Of course, this could be thought of as a benefit to viewers who would be reminded by seeing the taxidermy remnants that the object before them is not a whole bluebuck but instead one that has been taken apart and then put back together far from its original home. Realizing the object’s history can perhaps make us appreciate this extinct animal portrait as an artistic product.

The inside of the animal, its essence, is inconsistent in these portraits. There is some character description of the bluebuck in Paris: small, fearful, easy to hunt. Yet the taxidermied animal on display in MNHN appears to be the opposite—it looks quite regal and majestic. This is in contrast to the specimens in Sweden and the Netherlands which look rather frail. The portrait in Stockholm stresses the family status of the bluebuck as extinct, and the Paris exemplar’s story also points out its extinction. “Extinct” is indeed one of the essential characteristics of the bluebuck. Yet, quite unexpectedly, the Leiden specimen’s portrait does not make visible this characteristic at all. Nothing in this digital portrait would tell you that the thing you are looking at cannot be seen outside of a museum.

There is no single portrait of what a bluebuck was, or even of what it is today, in the archive of the natural history museum. It is an object of scientific curiosity in Leiden, a lamented victim in Paris, and a harbinger of extinctions-to-come in Stockholm. None of these are untrue, but they all seem incomplete taken alone. Perhaps brought together, they give us a fuller picture of the bluebuck and its extinction.

Natural history museums are being challenged in the twenty-first century to tackle the grand environmental challenges our age, including climate change and planetary mass extinction, in order to both educate the public and inspire action.33 Yet part of moving forward is acknowledging the past. Portraiture as a genre connects the present to the past: each portrait crystalizes a subject in a moment in time and presents that to a viewer in some indeterminate future. How the portrait of extinction is constructed in the museum matters, because looking at a bluebuck is an encounter with a historical traumatic event. The bluebucks did not choose to “sit” for these portraits—instead, their lives were violently ended and their bodies set in a museum context. That trauma demands memory, acknowledgement, and mourning. Loss and mourning have the potential to do work for contemporary environmentalism.34 The extinction of the bluebuck is a loss worth mourning—not as the universalizing trauma of the sixth mass extinction, but as a particular loss which “needs to be allowed this specificity if the loss is to have its full significance.”35 When I look at each bluebuck portrait, I am discovering irreplaceable lives.

Putting all three portraits together, we can create a composite understanding of the bluebuck as both a trace of the animal past in the archive and a portent for the future if ways of being in the world go unchanged. Museums themselves cannot change the bluebuck’s extinction history, but the visitor to the gallery might become a “transformed witness: the observer transformed by their observation” through their interaction with this history.36 As Jennifer Bonnell and Roger Simon have observed, exhibitions offering intimacy with “difficult” histories, such as extinction, challenge visitors “to ask what it means, in light of the experience of the past, to be what we are now (and, perhaps more significantly, how we might be in the future).”37 The transformed observer has the capacity to change future stories. Presenting the bluebuck in the museum will not bring the animal back to life, but displaying a well-thought-out portrait of the bluebuck has the potential to communicate this animal’s extinction history as something meaningful to the visitor. Through the encounter, the animal’s history might move beyond the archive.

Notes

1 This research was funded by the Research Council of Norway through the author’s project “Beyond Dodos and Dinosaurs: Displaying Extinction and Recovery in Museums” (project number 283523).

2 For a general discussion of portraits and their functions, see Catherine Soussloff, The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

3 Soussloff, The Subject in Art, 8

4 Merle Patchett, “Repair Work: Surfacing the Geographies of Dead Animals,” Museum and Society 6, no. 2 (2008): 98–122; Rachel Poliquin, “The Matter and Meaning of Museum Taxidermy,” Museum and Society 6, no. 2 (2008): 123–34; and Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

5 Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, “Objects and the Museum,” Isis 96 (2005): 561.

6 Jane C. Desmond, Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 6. For an idea of the entanglements in play, see also Donna Haraway’s analysis of taxidermy, Carl Akeley, and the American Museum of Natural History, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Social Text 11 (1984/85): 20–64.

7 Dolly Jørgensen, “Bettering Stories about Stories about Nature,” EcoZon@ 11 (2020): 200–7.

8 For a good overview of the historiography (although it is now somewhat dated), see Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, “Constructing Nature Behind Glass,” Museum and Society 6, no. 2 (2008): 73–97. For more recent scholarship, see Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museum of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); the essays in Liv Emma Thorsen, Karen A. Rader, and Adam Dodd, eds., Animals on Display: The Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), as well as other work by Liv Emma Thorsen, including “Animal Matter in Museums: Exemplifying Materiality,” in Hilda Kean and Philip Howell, eds., The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 171–95.

9 One picture taken by the museum is available online on their page introducing their zoological collections: https://www.nhm-wien.ac.at/forschung/1_zoologie_wirbeltiere/saeugetier-brsammlung. It is shown in ridiculously blue lighting that makes it appear bright blue.

10 For biographies of animals in museums, see Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, ed., The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011) and Liv Emma Thorsen, Elephants are Not Picked from Trees: Animal Biographies in Gothenburg Natural History Museum (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2014).

11 For histories of natural history collections and display practices, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Rader and Cain, Life on Display; Tony Bennet, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Anna Omedes and Ernesto Páramo, “The Evolution of Natural History Museums and Science Centers: From Cabinets to Museums to . . .” in The Future of Natural History Museums, ed. Eric Dorfman (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 168–83.

12 Hilde S. Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2000), 55.

13 For examples of animal display practices and representation, see Thorsen, Rader, and Dodd, eds., Animals on Display.

14 Anders Ekström, “Walk-in media: International exhibitions as media space,” in The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication, ed. Kirsten Drotner et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 17–30.

15 Duncan Grewcock, Doing Museology Differently (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

16 For discussion of the theoretical and artistic basis of the technique in Dutch paintings at the time, see Ulrike Kern, Light and Shade in Dutch and Flemish Art: A History of Chiaroscuro in Art Theory and Artistic Practice in the Netherlands of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).

17 Junko Aono, “Boy with a Mousetrap by Candlelight” (DT-100), in The Leiden Collection Catalogue, ed. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (New York, 2017), http://www.theleidencollection.com/archive/; and Dominique Surh, “Old Woman at a Window with a Candle”, (GD-103), in The Leiden Collection Catalogue, ed. Wheelock

18 Susan Donahue Kuretsky, “Light and Sight in Ter Brugghen’d Man Writing by Candlelight,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 9, no. 1 (2017), https://doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2017.9.1.4.

19 Both portraiture and genre painting were interested in social milieu and employed many of the same conventions: David R. Smith, “Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-century Dutch Painting,” The Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (1987): 407–30.

20 For this critique, see Wayne Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

21 Original labels in French. Translations by author.

22 This particular label is given in both Swedish and English. All other labels from this museum translated from Swedish by the author.

23 For the thylacine’s history, see Robert Paddle, The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of the Thylacine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

24 Soussloff, The Subject in Art, 8

25 http://data.biodiversitydata.nl/naturalis/specimen/RMNH.MAM.20681.b. All data and images linked to the specimen in the database are given the CC0 licence allowing their full usage under any conditions.

26 https://bioportal.naturalis.nl. More than eight million objects were in BioPortal as of October 2017.

27 Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016).

28 The image is found in Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière. Servant de suite à l’histoire des animaux Quadrupèdes, suppl. 4: 151–53, 1 plate (Schneider, Amsterdam, 1778). For discussion of the history of bluebuck images, see A. M. Husson and I. B. Holthuis, “The Earliest Figures of the Blaaubok,” Hippotragus leucophaeus (Pallas, 1766) and of the Greater Kudu, Tragelaphus strepsiceros (Pallas, 1766),” Zoologische Mededelingen 49, no. 5 (1975): 57–63. Many natural history drawings of the time were not drawn from animals in original habitats—artists often worked from animals in menageries, from mounted specimens or skins, or even from oral or written descriptions without having seen the animal in question.

29 BioPortal actually contains three-dimensional animated composite images of some of the extinct birds in the Naturalis collection, such as the Sharpe’s rail (Gallirallus sharpei), which is the only extant specimen of the species: https://bioportal.naturalis.nl/multimedia/RMNH.AVES.87485_3/term=Gallirallus+sharpei+&from=2. Perhaps someday they will expand the three-dimensional images to include the bluebuck.

30 In contrast, Merle Patchett undertook a physical close-up investigation of the Naturalis bluebuck, which she documented in “Repair Work.” Her project material is also available online at www.blueantelope.info.

31 The artist’s statement and images of his PixCell series are available at http://kohei-nawa.net/works/pixcell.

32 Finn Arne Jørgensen, “The Armchair Traveler’s Guide to Digital Environmental Humanities,” Environmental Humanities 4 (2014): 95–112.

33 Felicity Arengo et al., “The Essential Role of Museums in Biodiversity Conservation,” in The Future of Natural History Museums, ed. Eric Dorfman (London: Routledge, 2018), 92–96.

34 Sarah M. Pike, “Mourning Nature: The Work of Grief in Radical Environmentalism,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10, no. 4 (2016): 419–41 and Thom van Dooren, “Mourning Crows: Grief and Extinction in a Shared World,” in Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies, eds. Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 275–89.

35 Stephen Frosh, Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 21.

36 Hugo Reinert, “The Haunting Cliffs: Some Notes on Silence,” Parallax 24, no. 4 (2018): 501–12.

37 Jennifer Bonnell and Roger I. Simon, “‘Difficult’ exhibitions and intimate encounters,” Museum and Society 5, no. 2 (2007): 65–85.