Gusts of revulsion: Édouard Verreaux's imperial tableaux at the Exposition Universelle of 1867

Abstract

Unlike the vast majority of large-scale showpieces exhibited at nineteenth-century universal exhibitions, Édouard Verreaux's taxidermy group, Lion Attacking a Dromedary, has defied the odds and has survived well past its initial public display in the Tunisian section of the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In the context of its original ethnographic display in a space dedicated to the promotion of French colonialism, Verreaux's ambitious taxidermy tableau would have been understood as a representation of authentic life in Tunisia. This illusion of authenticity issued from the object's expert mimicking of the period's artistic conventions for depicting the relationship between people and animals in North Africa by artists such as Horace Vernet, Eugène Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and others. Instead of paint or plaster, Verreaux's composition took the form of an uncanny assemblage of body parts taken from a camel, two lions, and an anonymous human: in so doing, Verreaux used the tragic material of living beings to create a literal interpretation of the aesthetic tropes of French orientalism; with this world's fair showpiece, he thus violently bridged the theoretical and material divide between art and life. In this essay, I take these conjunctions between the “real” and the imaginary as a point of departure for discussing the feigned credulity of Lion Attacking a Dromedary. I contend that Verreaux's Lion Attacking a Dromedary should be considered as an imperial tableau, that is, as a didactic object that participated in training nineteenth-century viewers to be what the historian Ariella Azoulay has called “imperial citizens” by drawing equivalences between nature and culture, and between representation and reality.