Two men, born nineteen years apart and separated by the sea, made animals seem human, and both became famous for it. Hermann Ploucquet showed his scenes at the Great Exhibition in 1851. Walter Potter built his museum in a village in Sussex. Some people often mention them in the same breath, but they were very different.

Hermann Ploucquet was born in Stuttgart in 1816. He taught himself taxidermy from a book as a child, then became an assistant at the royal natural history cabinet in Stuttgart at seventeen and, in 1847, its chief taxidermist.

In 1850 he won a medal at a trade fair in Leipzig. His job was to mount specimens for a scientific museum. He made his comic scenes with professional training

Walter Potter had no museum post and no scientific training.

He was the son of a publican, largely self-taught, and he learned by doing. One auction house describes his work as “lacking anatomical correctness” but “extraordinarily detailed”.

The artist Damien Hirst, an admirer of Potter’s famous tableaux, pointed out that, in one case, a kingfisher looked nothing like a Kingfisher.

Ploucquet’s 1851 scenes at the Great Exhibition in London included dioramas of weasels hunting hares, duelling dormice, kittens drinking tea, ice-skating hedgehogs, shaving frogs, and a weasel schoolmaster disciplining rabbits.

His best-known work was a set of six scenes of Reynard the Fox. The composition and style of these displays were apparently greatly influenced by German artist Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s illustrations for Goethe’s classic poem, Reineke Fuchs (Reynard the Fox). Ploucquet’s comedy was sharp and satirical, whilst he also made serious scenes of birds of prey hunting, hounds baiting a boar, and a stag brought down.

Potter’s depictions were softer and more domestic – weddings, tea parties, village schools, cricket. The jokes are gentle and sentimental, and many are built on nursery rhymes.

Where Ploucquet laughs at human behaviour, Potter mostly dresses up animals as the people he knew.

Most of Ploucquet’s work has gone. After he lost his museum site to a railway in the 1860s, he sold much of his remaining work, and it reached the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in 1873 but was lost in the great fire of The Crystal Palace in 1936. His Reynard the Fox set survived: it stayed at Stoneleigh Abbey for decades, was sold by Christie’s in 1981, and is now in a private collection.

By contrast, much of Potter’s work survives, though it is scattered, and the linked article in this series traces some of it.