Its strength, says Robert Wenley, the exhibition’s curator, “is that it conveys beautifully the ponderousness of the beast.”Ĭlara was not the first rhinoceros to travel to Europe.
Not least is the small bronze of 1775 titled “A Rhinoceros, called Miss Clara”, acquired by the Barber in 1942 and on display ever since. A new exhibition at Birmingham’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts reveals how Clara’s clumsy but amiable form permeated the realms of painting, sculpture, printmaking, Meissenware, poetry and even horology. “La rhinomanie” extended far beyond France – and fashion. “All Paris, so easily inebriated by small objects, is now busy with a kind of animal called the rhinoceros,” scribbled the exasperated Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm to his friend, the philosopher and encyclopédiste, Denis Diderot. A librarian at the Sorbonne, meanwhile, got up close and personal enough to profess her tongue soft as velvet. It became fashionable among their rakish set to wear a coiffure imitating Clara’s horn, or a snuff box decorated with her likeness. Over the next 17 years, in the fastidious care of her owner – a Dutch sea captain named Douwe Mout van der Meer – she trundled through Europe on a reinforced cart, leaving everyone, royal or riffraff, charmed in her wake. These accomplishments stood the three-year-old rhinoceros in fine stead for her impending career as a touring showpiece. Besides oiling her hide to shield it from the marine air and salt water, they bequeathed her a knack for inhaling tobacco (it was thought to prevent infection) and a taste for sips of beer. She was a placid thing, though, and became a great favourite with the crew. To get to the Dutch Republic, the 350-stone creature, who later acquired the name Clara, had been subjected to seven months at sea on a gruelling route that took her around the part of Africa that sailors called the Cape of Storms.
When the 14th century explorer Marco Polo saw one in China, he assumed it was the fabled unicorn. Until a rhinoceros calf bobbed into the port of Rotterdam in 1741, on a ship from Kolkata, most Europeans would have sworn her horned and three-toed kind was mythical, on a par with Behemoth in the biblical book of Job.