White Rhino

The background for the White Rhinoceros group at the American Museum of Natural History was painted by James Perry Wilson in 1937. Apparently the back of the rhino closest to the background is painted white to reflect as much light as possible in the tight space and to avoid a shadow on the vertical surface. The painted detail in the mud around the pool and the reflections in the water is very accomplished but not up to the standard of the water in Wilson’s Coyote group (see Dioramas 2) where he also made the survey drawings and photographs. If you are looking at these as a stereo pair you can just see the very low ceiling masked as dark clouds.

Dioramas 2

Use the usual procedure to reconcile the stereo pair of pictures.

Wapiti

The Wapiti or Elk group is from the  Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History (1941). The background painting is by James Perry Wilson. Michael Anderson, the Wilson scholar who is based at the Yale Peabody Museum, wrote to me quoting a letter from Wilson where he is describing how he projected a slide he had taken of the moon so that it was three-foot by two foot on the wall. The moon came out three and an eighth inches in diameter. He notes that this is the same size as in the moon he painted in the Wapiti diorama (above). Michael asked me to calculate the focal length of the lens Wilson was using and therefore, working with Wilson’s projection method, calculate if the moon was the correct size in the diorama. The lens turned out to be 300mm, something Michael was later able to corroborate from notes on some of Wilson’s moon slides. From this and working out the depth of the diorama where the moon is painted from a scale drawing, I calculated that Wilson had painted the moon 50% too large. The picture above is rather small, but you can see the moon just above the horizon next to the tree in the left foreground. Wilson was fastidious about such things, so the discrepancy needed chasing. There is an optical anomaly called the moon illusion. When the moon is close to the horizon it appears 50% larger than when it is high in the sky. There are many theories for why this is, but there is consensus on the 50%. There are no notes from Wilson about this, but my speculation is that this is the reason why Wilson painted the moon this size.

Anyway, it is a stunning diorama and is looking wonderful after a spring clean (if a little over lit).

Look in the earlier Diorama posts for suggestions on how to view 3D pairs of photographs.

Florida Black Bear

Usually the diorama painters tried to keep everything but the sky on the pat of the diorama shell below where it forms a half dome. Although this section is curved in plan it is vertical in section. As soon as a  part of the painting transgresses onto the part of the wall that curves in section there is a problem when the observer moves – the parallax between the two viewing positions will distort the object. This is fine for a desert or even a mountain scene, where it is possible to paint everything below the dome. In a woodland scene where you are among the trees it is impossible to avoid, so James Perry Wilson, who painted this background, kinks the trunks of the trees just as the diorama shell transitions into the domed ceiling, or masks the straight trunks with palm leaves. You can see this transition if you look at the pair stereoscopically. (See advice on this a couple of posts down).

The light in this painting is very beautiful, catching a hazy moisture-laden air. It was painted in 1947 and is another diorama from the American Museum of Natural History in the North American Mammals hall