NATURAL HISTORY: HART BIRD

Edward Hart was a fine exponent of the genre of display of mounted birds as they would have been seen in their natural environment. Although the original concept is said to have been developed by ET Booth, Hart not only recreated the ground and trees from which his birds came, but also painted their backgrounds. The Museum hold the greater bulk of Hart's material, extending to several hundred cases, totalling nearly one thousand individual specimens.

Dr PA Morris states "With the 20th century came an awakening interest in ecology and behaviour. Hart's cases show that well. They encapsulate more than just the bird's structure and taxonomic status. This dichotomy of views on taxidermy display strategy is well documented in the literature. Whilst others also created diorama style cases, Hart managed to achieve extraordinary effects with perspective (unrivalled by anyone else, especially in comparatively small cases) and created an illusion of space within a glass fronted box that nobody else has yet matched .The collection is still intact when so many similar collections by Gentleman Naturalists (Themselves an important social phenomenon) have been broken up or lost to neglect...The collection is well documented in Hart's own notebooks. Few collections have this amount of information about the specimens".