DIORAMAS113naturalist, pioneered taxidermy dioramas. His setups did not include
painted backgrounds, but they situated the mounted animal skins among
recreations of the local vegetation.^15 Subsequently, Carl Akeley included
painted backgrounds in his white-tailed deer tableaux in Chicago’s Field
Museum. Olof Gylling, a scientist trained in taxidermy and a landscape
painter, in 1902 added the painted backdrop to his scenes and also intro-
duced the term diorama in this context. The same year, across the ocean,
Frank Chapman’s diorama including a painted background was unveiled
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (fig. 3.2). Chap-
man was the curator of ornithology at the museum, and he nurtured a
fervent conservationist ideology that brought him to closely consider the
emotive effect of painted scenes in sensitizing public opinion. This was
the professed motivation behind the desire to construct dioramic scenes:
environmental conservation campaigns required awe-inspiring visuals to
promote legislative changes and mobilize public opinion: How could city
dwellers care for and support the conservation of nature they could never
see? In some cases, this strategy worked. The institution of the first fed-
eral bird reserve was largely motivated by Chapman’s diorama of Pelican
Island, which persuaded president Theodore Roosevelt to declare it pro-
tected land. Chapman understood dioramas’ engaging potential as
FIGURE 3.2 Frank Chapman, The Wading Birds Diorama, 1903. Image courtesy of the
American Museum of Natural History, New York.