The Coastal Redwood Diorama is in the Hall of North American Forests which opened in 1958 at the American Museum of Natural History. It features the redwood tree (Sequoia sempervirens), among the tallest and oldest trees on Earth. Towering redwood trunks, heavy shade from the overhead canopy and lush understory vegetation are represented along with two Indigenous inhabitants of the forest grove, seen in the distance harvesting planks from a fallen giant. Although the diorama shell has a depth of only seven feet and a viewing window that is only two feet wide, an astonishing illusion of deep space and vertical height was created by background artist James Perry Wilson (1889 – 1976), using his unique gridding system of forced perspective, in collaboration with his foreground preparator Tomas Newberry.
The Coastal Redwood Diorama was based on field expeditions to a specific site in Humboldt County, California to collect specimens for the diorama and make scientific and artistic field observations. Artists and preparators photographed the landscape, painted plein-air studies, collected bark, plants, and other foreground materials and made notes of the light conditions and atmospheric effects.
The habitat diorama is presented as an objective reconstruction of nature, an exact ecological scene derived from field observation and scientific knowledge. Yet the scene that is created is also shaped by aesthetic conventions, cultural assumptions, and historical choices thereby exposing a fundamental truth about history itself: even when based on evidence, representations of the past are inevitably filtered through human ideas about nature. Apart from its scientific mandate, the diorama scene conveys a romantic view of nature as a sublime wilderness, the ancient forest grove as a cathedral of nature and the Indigenous people as symbolic inhabitants of this primeval world.
The narrative theme, ionography and composition of the diorama can be seen in the 1874 painting “Giant Redwood Trees of California” by Albert Bierstadt (1830 – 1902). Like Wilson, Bierstadt had carefully documented his painting by travelling to the site of the redwood grove and making plein-air sketches. He too situated Indigenous figures in the scene to convey the scale of the enormous trees and give it a sense of primordial timelessness. Both forms of representation also embody a national identification with big trees as spectacular natural monuments unique to America. However behind these scenes of picturesque wilderness is the factual history of the destruction of the redwood forests and the extermination of their Indigenous inhabitants caused by the invasion of settlers in Northern California. Thus both painting and diorama reveal a culture capable of desecrating the irreplaceable ancient trees while at the same time memorializing them in aesthetic reverence.
Another species of big tree native to California is on view at the entrance to the Hall of North American Forests. The famous “Giant Sequoia” display is a 16 foot cross section of a 1,400 year old sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) that weighs 9 tons and has 1,342 annual rings with markers for major historical events; its Life History. Known as the Mark Twain Tree, it began growing about 550 CE and was 300 feet high when it was felled in 1891 during an era when ruthless logging was making the Sequoia extinct. Because of the symmetrical proportions of the Mark Twain Tree, “one of the most perfect trees in the grove,” it was selected to provide cross sections for public display at the American Museum of Natural History and the Natural History Museum in London: “We can begin to picture in our imagination the span of life that has been enjoyed by this hardy forest Methuselah” A Tree’s Life Through Thirteen Centuries.
The rare and ancient redwood and sequoia groves of California were lauded in popular literature as America’s cathedrals of nature at the same time that they were being exterminated for roof shingles and planks by the logging industry. For a visual narrative of how big tree iconography shifted from sacred symbol to industrial stumpage, see the website by Karen Wonders: Cathedral Grove.
The domination of one view of nature over another is revealed in the history of the habitat diorama. Like the cut down ancient tree giants that were memorialized in photographs and displayed in museums as trophies of human hegemony, big game heads and horns were often similarly presented as symbols of masculinity and conquest in museum dioramas and interwoven with national identity.
A photo of the felling of the iconic Mark Twain Tree shows two men standing inside the fatal cut their axes had made into the giant stem. The celebration of male ingenuity and strength are also values that inform the European tradition in art of representing wild animals as hunting trophies. Bierstadt, for example, was a hunter and often included big game animals in his romantic paintings of western wilderness landscapes. He even featured his own antler trophy in a painting of a regal bull moose (Alces alces) that he shot in Maine in c. 1880. It had the eighth largest antlers recorded by the Boone and Crockett Club, of which Bierstadt was a member. These antlers were donated to the New York Zoological Society and later to the Boston Museum of Science. By the end of the century, due to over-hunting and habitat loss, the moose was rapidly becoming extinct.
The moose is associated with national pride due to its large size and above all its antlers which are also the defining scientific character of the animal. These have an unusual broad and palmate (open hand shape) configuration that is scored for trophy status according to exact measurements: of the total width (spread) between the two antlers; of the size of each palm; of the mass or circumference of the beam (central shaft) between the burr (base) and the palm; and of the number and size of the tines or points (spikes on the palm). Mounted moose specimens in habitat dioramas often have trophy sized racks weighing up to 80 pounds. A similar iconography occurs in the earliest illustrations of the moose and continues in the 20th century emergence of wildlife art.
One of the earliest depictions of the moose was by the English artist George Stubbs (1724 – 1806), who specialized in horses. In 1770 he was commissioned by the anatomist William Hunter to paint a young live bull moose from direct observation. Sent from the Govenor of Quebec to the Duke of Richmond, this was the first animal to arrive in England from the New World. Too young to have antlers, Stubbs included the antlers from another mature moose in his painting. Clearly the trophy value of the antlers was of utmost importance to his royal patron. Stubbs’ painting was engraved as a scientific illustration and published in Thomas Pennant’s Arctic Zoology (1784) despite its imaginative flourishes such as the generic romantic landscape, the pronounced equine musculature of the moose and his prominent eyelashes. Eighteenth century European depictions of the North American moose were both scientific and subjective and contributed to the Linnaean discourse on species as well as to the debate on the extinction of this mysterious creature. In Nordic countries, where the moose had not been exterminated, its representation in art and science took on a different historical perspective.
The “Moose Deer” engraving in Arctic Zoology also appeared as a vignette on the frontispiece of the two-volume book. Despite the importance of this early work on scientific nomenclature, the moose was incorrectly labeled as a deer. Also the vignette was not a direct copy of the original moose painting by Stubbs. Rather the moose head in the vignette was embellished with a set of trophy antlers as well as a prominently dangling dewlap or bell. Like the antlers, this morphological feature performed a sexual function during rutting season but what was communicated was not so much scientific information as the entrenched medieval iconography of the hunt of game animals.
The original moose painting by Stubbs was commissioned in part as scientific evidence to argue against the theory of the distinguished French naturalist Comte de Buffon that the native North American moose was an inferior derivation of the prehistoric Irish elk. The elk’s enormous antlers, on display in numerous European natural history collections, were viewed as symbols of status and superiority.
Buffon’s theory that “the animals common both to the old and New World are smaller in the latter” was also challenged by the American polymath Thomas Jefferson. He ordered that a trophy sized bull moose from the woods of New Hampshire be killed and had its skin, skeleton and antlers sent to Buffon. When the various parts of the moose arrived in Paris in 1787, they were so degraded (apart from the antlers), that it was impossible to reconstruct a taxidermic specimen. Nevertheless, Jefferson declared this moose as proof of the “stature and majesty of American quadrupeds.”
Part of the confusion about the North American moose was caused by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus). He had observed the European moose (“älg” in Swedish) in the forests outside his home in Uppsala. But he incorrectly placed the species in the genus Cervus that covered almost all of the antlered animals and gave it the specific name alces, derived for the Latin work for the European elk. Later it was recognized that the moose was biologically distinct (especially its palmate antlers) and deserved its own genus: Alces alces. The name “moose” was an Algonquin (Indigenous) word adopted by the early British explorers of what is now Canada. Thus this mistaken identity in scientific nomenclature resulted in one of the rare occasions that the native name of an animal endured over its European name which remains “elk.” Just as the history of science aspires to objectivity yet is shaped by human concepts, habitat dioramas are not neutral reproductions of nature but carefully composed theatrical works of art that embody both natural history and cultural narratives.
Even today, the 10th edition of Systema Naturae by Linnaeus, published in 1758, is considered the foundational scientific treatise on zoological nomenclature. In the early 18th century, natural history increasingly became a means by which European states categorized and represented their territorial resources. Collecting and naming the plants, animals and minerals thus was not only a scientific quest but also a national agenda. Sweden’s systematic study of domestic natural resources strengthened the nation and the work by Linnaeus contributed to this effort.
Systema Naturae prepared the stage for the Swedish flora and fauna to be catalogued systematically; for economically useful plants to be identified; and for the nation’s natural wealth to be scientifically documented. The collecting travels by Linnaeus throughout Sweden gave the native landscapes and their inhabitants a national identity that became part of the Swedish tradition of natural history study that flourished in the 19th century.
The illustrator of the frontispiece of the 1760 edition of Systema Naturae was the German Gottfried August Gründler (1710–1775), who served as curator of the Naturalienkabinett in Halle, one of the most significant scientific institutions of the time. For Gründler, natural history was an empirical science determined by physico-theology, a doctrine that sought to prove Creation by documenting the three kingdoms of nature.
The iconography of the frontispiece embodies this view and also incorporates medieval antler symbolism. The branching antlers of the two stags positioned at the base of Diana or Mother Nature (Natura Multimammia) convey the Linnaean hierarchy whereby the perfectly symmetrical antlers are split into multiple tines or points. These are not simply taxonomic features; they are a heraldic iconography that represent the aristocratic right to hunt. Also the reclining pose of the stags symbolizes the noble dignity of a royal hunting trophy.
The landscape setting in the engraving by Gründler recedes into distance and includes mountains, a body of water, different types of vegetation and various animals drawn from the specimens in his Naturalienkabinett. It reveals his ambition to survey all of nature within a single conceptual framework and anticipates the later Humboldtian worldview, although here the emphasis is still on classification rather than relationships and habitat. The scene is arranged like a curated stage or theatrical tableaux with a stage arch or proscenium, of two trees as a frame. In essence the engraving is a visual manifesto of Linnaean natural history, portraying the plants, animals, and minerals as an ordered system that humans can name, classify, and comprehend and as such is a forerunner to the ecological holism of the habitat diorama.
The Linnaean natural history tradition in Sweden encouraged the early formation of a strong patriotic identification with the Nordic flora and fauna. Sweden’s biological museums were created by the hunter-naturalist and taxidermist Gustaf Kolthoff (1845 – 1923), who aimed to educate the public about the native wildlife by displaying mounted specimens in an illusionistic setting. When the Biologiska museet opened in Stockholm in 1893 it was one of the earliest examples of a natural history panorama, or habitat diorama.
Among the native animals on display is a bull moose with an impressive set of antlers. As in America, the moose was considered a species of national identity in Sweden and celebrated by hunters as a big game trophy. Other animals that appear in the naturalistic landscape tableaux include a bear, lynx, fox, hare, wolf, reindeer, badger and a variety of birds; sea eagles, falcons, puffins, fulls, wood grouse, swans, geese, ducks and so on.
Also in Canada, habitat dioramas frequently display moose specimens such as the one at the Royal Alberta Museum in which the boreal forest background was painted by the Canadian wildlife artist Clarence Tillenius (1913 – 2012).
Habitat dioramas appear to present nature as an objective fact, yet they are historical constructions shaped by the priorities of the period that produced them. The zoological specimens within them, especially large game mammals such as moose, often reflect an iconography inherited from a masculine hunting culture based on antlers and other trophy features. As a result, displays that ostensibly reconstruct ecological relationships foreground the animal as a specimen of size, rarity, or record antler spread, rather than as part of a living system. Interpreting these dioramas historically therefore reveals how scientific display, museum practice, and the aesthetics of the trophy tradition have combined to shape what viewers understand as “nature.”