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Auctioneers to Sell Museum's Collection

Posted on: Friday, 25 July 2003, 06:00 CDT

Stuffed kittens dressed in bridal gear, a two-headed lamb, a four-legged duck: for more than a century, Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities has been amusing and horrifying visitors.

Now the whole bizarre collection is going under the hammer.

On Sept. 23 and 24 auctioneers Bonhams will sell the collection of around 10,000 items at the museum site in Bolventor, southwest England.

Jon Baddeley of Bonhams said it took him and two assistants a month to sort out the collection, which he expects to raise around 250,000 pounds (U.S. $400,000).

"It must be unique, I've never seen anything like it, Baddeley said. "There's a black rhino head, for example. There can't be many of those and there aren't many black rhino left, anyway," Baddeley said in a recent interview.

"Some people say that all those stuffed animals aping humans is a horrible idea. But you have to admire the skill," added Baddeley, who described one tableau of a monkey riding a goat as "pure Salvador Dali."

In the Kittens' Wedding tableau, 20 stuffed kittens are posed in clothes of the style of the late 1890s. With strict attention to detail, Mr. Potter furnished the bridesmaids with frilly bloomers.

There are rats in a gambling den and Spot the dog which caught the rats, squirrels playing cards, a mummified hand, a hen which laid 462 eggs in one year, a classroom of rabbits and a scuffling iron used by smugglers to make false hoof marks to confuse pursuers.

The museum was founded in Bramber, 50 miles south of London by Walter Potter, the local innkeeper's son, who began collecting in the 1860s at the age of at 14 and eventually set up his museum across the road from the inn.

Subsequent owners added to it and moved it around England until it settled at Bolventor's Jamaica Inn, an old smugglers' tavern which inspired the 1936 novel by Daphne du Maurier.

The museum gets between 20,000 and 30,000 visitors a year who are told that the animals were not killed for the display. Many were given to Potter by his neighbors, local farmers and gamekeepers; most are over 100 years old.

Kevin Moore, the inn managing director, said owner John Watts wants the museum space to add guest rooms to the inn.

"The resident taxidermist who tidied up the exhibits when fur started falling out died last year and the curator retired. We tried vigorously to sell the museum in one piece since November last year but despite worldwide interest there was no offer," he said.

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