WHERE THE DIORAMA WAS BORN — AND WHAT BECAME OF IT
- SaveMPM
- 5 hours ago
- 9 min read
Based on A Special Style: Milwaukee Public Museum 1882–1982
Look at the photograph below before you read anything else. Take a moment with it. Note the wheeled dollies. The utilitarian shelving. The fluorescent light. The way the animals lean — unsupported, uncrated, in a basement storage room with no visible climate control, no archival housing, no conservation protocol in evidence.
Now consider what you are actually looking at.
These are not generic taxidermy specimens. They are not background scenery that can be replicated or replaced. As far as current research indicates, these are the earliest surviving objects in which Carl Akeley used the armature-and-plaster anatomical mounting technique — the very innovation that made the habitat diorama possible. They predate the muskrat group that made him famous. They predate his Chicago work. They predate the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York that the world associates with his name.
They are, in the most literal sense, where it all began. And right now, they are on rolling dollies in a basement.
To understand why that matters — why it is not merely sad but consequential — you have to understand what Carl Akeley actually did in Milwaukee, and what Milwaukee gave to the world as a result.
A YOUNG TAXIDERMIST AND A PROBLEM NOBODY COULD SOLVE
In 1887, Carl Akeley began working half-time at the Milwaukee Public Museum for fifty cents an hour. He was not yet famous. He had no formal college degree. He ran a small taxidermy shop of his own, doing commission work for the museum whenever curator Henry Doerflinger needed something mounted.
The connection that brought him to Milwaukee runs through Ward’s Scientific Establishment in Rochester, New York — then the premier supplier of natural history specimens to museums across the country. There, a young scientist named William Morton Wheeler befriended Akeley and recognized his gifts. Though Akeley lacked the schooling for college admission, Wheeler offered to tutor him in exchange for taxidermy work. Akeley agreed — but first came an opportunity too rare to pass up. P.T. Barnum’s famous elephant Jumbo had just died, and assisting in the skinning and mounting of the world’s most famous animal was, as the museum’s own centennial history notes, a learning experience no taxidermist in the United States could reasonably decline.
By 1886, Akeley was settled in Milwaukee. And he was already deeply dissatisfied with how taxidermy was done.
The standard practice of the era involved stuffing sewn-up animal skins and propping them on iron leg rods. The museum’s own history puts the result plainly: mounts that looked “more upholstered than lifelike.” For a working taxidermist with Akeley’s eye, this was intolerable.
The breakthrough came from a practical problem. Curator Doerflinger had secured a remarkable collection of Lapp — or Sami — ethnographic materials from Tromsø, Norway: a full sled, harness, reindeer skins, and costume elements. The task of mounting this material fell to Akeley. And the standard tools failed him immediately. The museum had no cast of a Lapp face. Correspondence with the Smithsonian and institutions across the country turned up nothing. None of them had casts either.
Forced to find another way, Akeley did something no one had quite done before. He mounted the reindeer hides not over a stuffed form, but over a skeletal-like armature covered with plaster — sculpted by hand to delineate the actual anatomy of the living animal beneath the skin. The result looked like a real animal. He harnessed the deer to the sled, placed a felt-clad mannequin on the seat clutching a taut rein, and built a base of simulated snow beneath it all.
This was not a specimen in a case. It was a scene — a moment captured from life, with narrative, with context, with implied motion. Museum historians would later identify this Sami reindeer tableau as the earliest direct ancestor of what became the “Milwaukee style” of museum exhibit-making.
(A footnote worth knowing: the sled Doerflinger procured from Tromsø was later discovered to be a freight sled — not the kind driven by a passenger. Akeley and his associates were entirely unaware of the anachronism. But the conceptual leap the exhibit represented was undeniable regardless.)
THE ARTISTS ACROSS THE STREET
To understand what happened next, you have to look not inside the Exposition Building — where the museum’s collections were housed — but across Grand Avenue from it, at one of the most extraordinary art-industrial enterprises in nineteenth-century Milwaukee: the cyclorama studios of William Wehner.
Cycloramas were the cinema of their age. Enormous circular paintings, typically fifty feet high and four hundred feet around, were installed inside purpose-built round buildings so that visitors standing in the center felt completely surrounded by a landscape, a battlefield, a natural scene. The illusion was achieved through careful manipulation of perspective, tone, and the seamless blending of painted sky into three-dimensional terrain at the viewer’s feet. Milwaukee was a major center of this industry.
The cyclorama painters were German-trained artists — among them George Peter and Franz Bieberstein — who had mastered techniques of illusionistic depth, forced perspective, and what we would now call environmental storytelling. They understood how to make a flat surface disappear into infinite space. They understood how to blend the painted with the three-dimensional so thoroughly that the eye could not detect the seam.
Akeley worked directly with these artists. The museum’s centennial history documents that Peter and Bieberstein contributed painted backgrounds to early museum installations, and that Akeley drew explicitly on cyclorama techniques — and on the cyclorama as a conceptual model — when developing his diorama idea. When he eventually presented the concept to the museum’s trustees, he used the cyclorama as a reference point, knowing they would immediately grasp what he meant: the same principle of surrounding immersive illusion, scaled down from entertainment spectacle to natural history display.
The cyclorama was the forerunner of the movies — and of the diorama. Both innovations found their birthplace, in different ways, in Milwaukee.
THE MUSKRAT DIORAMA: A REVOLUTION COMPLETED
By 1889, the threads were ready to be woven together. The trustees asked Akeley to create a series of exhibits showing all of Wisconsin’s fur-bearing animals. What he produced went so far beyond their expectations that the museum history describes it as potentially having been “too revolutionary” even for the supportive trustees of that era.
Using a muskrat colony as his demonstration model, Akeley built what the museum history calls the first total habitat group in a curved diorama shell with three-dimensional materials. Every element worked in concert: sculptural foreground materials blended imperceptibly into painted backgrounds that curved away into simulated distance. Plants and trees created the texture of a real environment. The animals were posed with anatomical precision, interacting with their world as they would in nature.
And then came the touch of pure genius the museum history singles out as the exhibit’s tour de force: Akeley positioned the cross-section of a muskrat lodge against the glass front of the case, so that visitors could see both the exterior and interior of the structure simultaneously — the animals’ world revealed from within and without at the same moment. No museum had done anything like it.
The muskrat diorama was completed in 1890. It still exists at the Milwaukee Public Museum today. The museum’s centennial history notes that even a century later, it compared favorably with contemporary exhibits in aesthetic quality and educational power. It is, in every meaningful sense, the ancestor of every habitat diorama in every natural history museum on earth.
THE MILWAUKEE ORIGINS OF THE HABITAT DIORAMA
1883 — William Wehner’s cyclorama studio opens across from the Exposition Building. German-trained artists begin mastering large-scale illusionistic painting.
1884 — Thure Kumlien hired as the museum’s first “Conservator.” Standard taxidermy techniques produce stiff, upholstered-looking mounts.
1886 — Carl Akeley settles in Milwaukee. Develops his armature-and-plaster anatomical mounting technique — animals that look alive for the first time.
Late 1880s — The Sami reindeer tableau: Akeley’s first narrative environmental exhibit. Cyclorama artists Peter and Bieberstein begin collaborating on curved painted backgrounds.
1890 — The muskrat habitat diorama — the first fully realized habitat diorama in museum history. The “Milwaukee style” is born.
1896 — Akeley departs for the Field Museum in Chicago, carrying his techniques with him. His methods become the worldwide standard.
1909–1936 — Akeley’s techniques refined at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The Akeley Hall of African Mammals becomes one of the masterpieces of museum design. The world calls the form his invention — often forgetting where it began.
WHAT NEW YORK SAID ABOUT MILWAUKEE’S LEGACY
The American Museum of Natural History in New York has approximately 150 habitat dioramas — created in the same tradition of craftsmen, scientists, and artists that Akeley developed in Milwaukee. That institution has never been shy about what those dioramas mean, or why they must be protected. Its leaders have said so in print.
“Nothing embodies the spirit and mission of the museum so completely as these painstakingly created, lifelike habitat displays which are recognized internationally as superb examples of the fusion of art and science. They set out to educate us about nature and science, and to engender feelings of wonder in — and stewardship of — the natural world. And they succeed brilliantly.”
— Ellen V. Futter, President, American Museum of Natural History. Foreword to Windows on Nature by Stephen Quinn, 2005.
“The dioramas succeed as tools of conservation, as artistic marvels, even as examples of superb technology. But their real power is in the hearts and minds of those who view them and are inspired by them — not just the general public but generations of scientists and artists.”
— Lewis W. Bernard, Chairman, American Museum of Natural History. Foreword to Windows on Nature by Stephen Quinn, 2005.
Those words were written about the AMNH’s collection — the very collection whose tradition was born in Milwaukee, in the hands of Carl Akeley, at the institution now in the middle of a transition with no comprehensive public inventory of what is being preserved, sold, or destroyed.
The American Museum of Natural History has protected and celebrated that legacy. It has named its dioramas as central to its mission. It has published books affirming their irreplaceable value to science, conservation, and public memory.
Milwaukee’s approximately 150 “Milwaukee Style” habitat and immersive exhibits — the collection that preceded and inspired New York’s — are now facing an uncertain fate with no equivalent public commitment on record.
Milwaukee was not a precursor phase in the history of the diorama. It was the origin site — the place where immersive museum practice was invented.
WHAT IS AT STAKE RIGHT NOW
Return to the photograph at the top of this post. The objects on those dollies are not waiting for a conservation plan. They are waiting to find out if there is one.
The original Sami exhibit was dismantled in the 1980s. No photographs of it on display are known to survive. What remains are the mounts themselves — the oldest surviving objects made with the technique that changed museum history. And right now, according to a documented photograph, they are in a basement, leaning against shelving, on rolling carts, with no visible archival housing.
Storing them this way is the institutional equivalent of keeping an early Rodin sketch in a janitor’s closet. The comparison is not hyperbole. In the hierarchy of objects that document the origin of modern museum practice, these mounts belong in a conservation facility — or on display — not leaning unsupported in the dark.
As Milwaukee County and MPM, Inc. proceed with the transition to a new facility, the public that funded this institution for more than a hundred years has received no comprehensive public inventory of what is being preserved, what is being sold, and what is being discarded. The Disposition Plan currently governing non-collection assets — File No. 25-586, Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors — ends its disposal pipeline with the words: “final disposal — discard, destruction, or contracted haul-away.”
Before that pipeline reaches the objects Carl Akeley left behind, Milwaukee deserves answers to five questions:
1. Are the historic habitat dioramas formally accessioned under the 2021 Collections Policy?
2. Have they been appraised at fair market value?
3. If their value exceeds $5,000 — has the County Board provided the required approval?
4. What written determination establishes they meet the standard for destruction?
5. What preservation alternatives were formally evaluated?
“In storage” is not a collections plan. And a basement is not a conservation vault.
CONTACT YOUR MILWAUKEE COUNTY SUPERVISOR
Decisions about what survives the transition are being made now. Your supervisor needs to hear from you before they become irreversible.
Sources: Lurie, Nancy Oestreich. A Special Style: The Milwaukee Public Museum, 1882–1982. Milwaukee Public Museum, 1983. Chapter 2: “The Exposition Building, 1884–1898.” · Quinn, Stephen. Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History. Abrams, 2006. Forewords by Ellen V. Futter and Lewis W. Bernard. · Milwaukee County Board File No. 25-586: Plan for Disposition of the Milwaukee Public Museum’s Surplus Personal Property and Milwaukee County Fixtures, 2025. · Milwaukee County Board File No. 21-259: MPM Collections Policy, 2021. · Basement photograph: Paul Dorobialski. · All historical claims drawn from the museum’s own centennial history.