Background painter Jan Vriesen is seen standing inside the Barkerville Habitat Diorama in 1980, in a photograph taken by Karen Wonders while she was an intern studying under him at the Royal British Columbia Museum. The convincing spatial illusion of this diorama is due to the skill of the artist, who uses paint to make the boundary between real and painted space undetectable.
Part of the Human History Gallery, the Barkerville Diorama illustrates the ecological devastation of a watershed caused by arsenic contamination from rampant placer mining for gold during the 1860s. The museum closed the Gallery to the public in 2022, officially to decolonize its Eurocentric narrative, and reopened only after a public outcry. Despite its astonishing illusion and important lessons in environmental history, the diorama is at risk of being dismantled so that the hall can be recurated and redesigned.
Habitat dioramas are illusionistic exhibits in natural history museums that typically feature mounted zoological specimens arranged within a foreground replicating the species’ natural habitat. Ideally, this faux terrain merges imperceptibly into a painted background landscape, creating an illusion of atmospheric depth and distance. While the history of the habitat diorama is largely a man’s world, a remarkable exception is Martha Maxwell (1831 – 1881), who created her own taxidermic tableaux for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. A derisively labeled stereoscopic photograph of her exhibit depicts a group of wildlife specimens posed within a landscape representing the Rocky Mountains.
This website is about the art of habitat dioramas and was created by Karen Wonders to explore the potential of these natural history scenarios or tableaux as a popular art idiom for communicating ideas about the loss of biodiversity. Indeed, this was the founding concept behind the origin of the habitat diorama at the turn of the 19th century. These exhibits are a complex marriage of science and art that requires the initiative, expertise, and talent of many individuals, as well as institutional support and private patronage.
As the art form developed, the background painter’s role became ever more important in sustaining the illusionistic function of the three dimensional display. It is a paradoxical aspiration: to conjure vast atmospheric depth on a shallow, often curved surface, and to do so in such a way that the illusion aligns seamlessly with the foreground tableau. The crucial “tie in” area of the Barkerville Diorama, between the real rocks and those that are painted, cannot be seen: it is an invisible transition created by the background artist working closely with the foreground preparators. This manipulation of the viewer’s perception of space and distance is a convergence of optical, painterly, and perceptual strategies derived from visual observation and traditions of aerial perspective that date back to the Renaissance.
James Perry Wilson (1889 – 1976), one of the most accomplished artists of this genre, viewed diorama painting as one of the highest forms of art. Not only does it require a scientific understanding of light and how it is perceived, but for the visual magic of the background landscape to work, it must imperceptibly “tie in” to real objects. What the artist is doing, he said, is “controlling what the public sees with every brush stroke and from every angle.”
In the Living Forest Habitat Diorama at the Royal British Columbia Museum, a Roosevelt elk (Cervus canadensis roosevelti) bull is seen alongside two cows in his harem. The huge Sitka spruce trees characteristic of the dense, ancient temperate rainforest habitat of this species are replicated in the foreground by the exhibit preparators and repeated in the background landscape painted by Jan Vriesen. Such old growth forests, found in the nutrient rich floodplains of coastal rivers on Vancouver Island, provide elk with critical foraging habitat.
The Roosevelt elk is a species of concern due to its declining numbers, yet there is no effective protection plan to prevent the ongoing destruction of its ancient rainforest habitat by commercial logging. While this diorama reinforces the government’s tourism campaign promoting Vancouver Island as a nature paradise, the reality is something quite different. For a visual narrative of the destruction of ancient forests, see Karen Wonders: Cathedral Grove.
Big game species such as the Roosevelt elk were a major part of the early natural history collections of the British Columbia Provincial Museum, founded in 1886. The first curator, John Fannin, was a taxidermist and hunter naturalist who donated many of his own specimens to the museum. The museum’s mandate was to secure and preserve specimens illustrating the province’s natural history and to collect anthropological material relating to the Indigenous peoples of the province. A postcard shows its exceptional big game collection of conventional mounts, but Fannin had toured international museums and learned about the new group method. After his visit to the Provincial Museum in 1898, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, Morris Ketchum Jesup, noted that special attention had been given to “groups of birds and mammals presented in their natural environments.”
One of the earliest such “environmental” groups at the Provincial Museum was a pre 1900 display case of several egret specimens mounted in lifelike poses and arranged in a naturalistic foreground with a painted background landscape. The descriptive term “habitat group” was first used in the museum context in 1909 to refer to natural history displays that typically featured mounted zoological specimens arranged in a foreground that replicated their native surroundings (haunts or habitats) in the wild and included a landscape painting that had been done from field sketches of the actual geographical location.
The museological development of the habitat group (or diorama as it later came to be called) has varied in its didactic function, its style of presentation and the natural history objects that it displayed. When humans were represented (most commonly Indigenous people), the displays were called “life groups.”
Among the variations of habitat groups that evolved for specialized exhibition purposes were: simple groups (no background landscape); miniature groups (not life scale); composite groups (many species in one locale); serial groups (several continuous settings); systematic groups (related zoological species that inhabit different geographical areas); picturesque groups (theatrical in effect); trophy groups (big game specimens with record dimensions); narrative groups (portraying the relationships between species); and zonal groups (illustrating the effect of altitude and climatic zones on the evolution and distribution of plants and animals).
During the 20th century, a transition took place in museums across North America from simple groups in contained display cases to elaborate habitat dioramas with scientifically accurate foregrounds and panoramic landscapes. An example is the Seabirds Habitat Diorama at the Royal British Columbia Museum, created in 1978 by the exhibits staff and the American freelance mural painters Elma and Jerome Connolly.
The diorama features a coastal ecosystem near Triangle Island and includes a group of Snow Geese (Anser caerulescens) and Mallard ducks (Anas platyrhynchos) in a tidal marshland of mudflats and dried grasses. The diorama illustrates the natural history of the Fraser River Delta, a critical overwintering habitat for migrating species that is currently being destroyed by the industrial expansion of the Port of Vancouver, by heavily increasing oil tanker transport and by persistent pollution.
The natural history galleries at the Royal British Columbia Museum were designed as “living landscapes,” with lifelike taxidermy, real elements such as tide pools with live creatures, and audiovisual technology. This innovative concept for creating an immersive experience of the province’s ecosystems was initiated by the French exhibition designer Jean Jacques André during the 1970s. Museum visitors can peer through a cave in the Living Ocean Diorama to catch a glimpse of a sea otter foraging on the beach for urchins. The rocks and foreshore were prepared by the exhibits staff, and the background landscape was painted by Jan Vriesen.
Sea otters were incorrectly named by Linnaeus in 1758, and it was not until 1991 that the northern subspecies, Enhydra lutris kenyoni, was described. Following their discovery by Europeans during Captain Cook’s voyage in 1778, sea otters became a major target of the maritime fur trade; their exceptionally valuable pelts leading to the near extinction of the species. By 1900, Victoria had become the world centre for the industrial slaughter of these sea mammals.
When sea otters were finally given protection under the International Fur Seal Treaty of 1911, only thirteen remnant groups remained on the Pacific Coast. Following their extirpation from British Columbia, the last verified sea otter was shot on Vancouver Island in 1929. Since their reintroduction from Alaska in the late 1960s, the sea otter population has recovered but remains listed as a species of “Special Concern.” Beginning in the early 20th century, the display of ocean mammals such as seals, otters, and walruses in habitat dioramas contributed to public awareness of the threat of extinction faced by these species and helped spur campaigns for their conservation.
Habitat dioramas can be described as a form of ecological theatre in which animal actors star in an evolutionary play. Yet they also function as mausoleums of a vanishing heritage, erected in museums for the education of an urban public increasingly alienated from the natural world. Today, the accelerating rate of species extinction and habitat degradation means that certain wildlife species and their natural habitats may no longer exist except in preserved museum contexts.
Much of this website’s historical content and many of its illustrations are drawn from Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History (Uppsala, 1993) by Karen Wonders. The website examines these illusionistic scenarios as windows onto nature, ranging from intimate biological habitats to vast wilderness panoramas. It also considers habitat dioramas as reflections of human imaginings of being both apart from and within the natural world during a tumultuous period spanning 19th century natural history and hunting narratives, evolutionary biology, and the contemporary age of extinction and unprecedented biodiversity loss.
