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The earliest depictions of Clara date from 1749, and comprise, somewhat bizarrely, a pair of anatomical engravings, made by Jan Wandelaar for Professor Bernhard Siegfried Albinus’s treatise Tabulae Sceleti et Musculorum Corporis Humani, in which she appears next to a human skeleton apparently, the “rareness” of the animal was felt by Albinus to be, in context, an “agreeable” ornament. Curated by the Barber’s head of collections, Robert Wenley, this is the best small exhibition I’ve seen in years: a single-room display that fills the visitor with wonderment at every turn. The result, a veritable menagerie of a show, is just about perfect. Since 1942, the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham has owned a diminutive bronze of this extraordinary pachyderm ( A Rhinoceros, called Miss Clara, c1750, after Peter-Anton von Verschaffelt), and it’s around this adorable sculpture – stubby, but determinedly proud – that the gallery has built its latest exhibition, one that features not only many artistic representations of Van der Meer’s rhinoceros, but depictions, too, of several other celebrity beasts, among them elephants called Hansken, Jumbo and Chunee a hippopotamus who was known as Obaysch and a nameless zebra from Ethiopia whose owner liked to boast of how its exquisite stripes produced “the effect of a little horse in masquerade”. That armour-plated skin! The single horn that made her look, in the eyes of the public, just a little like a unicorn! And Clara’s appearance wasn’t only a hit with the crowds artists loved her too, preserving her for posterity in marble, bronze and porcelain, in pencil, chalk and oil – and thanks to this, she’s about to enjoy a moment all over again.
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You feel almost envious of the crowd’s goggled-eyed fascination
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For the pleasure of her company – in spite of her diet of hay, bread, orange peel and the occasional draught of beer, her temperament was ever placid – people were willing to pay the equivalent of half a day’s wages for a skilled tradesman. But for Van der Meer, such wanderings were worth the trouble (it took eight horses to pull Clara’s enclosure). He named this marvellous beast Clara, and for the next 17 years the two of them toured the continent ceaselessly a modern map of their travels, all coloured arrows and sinuous lines, brings to mind a page from the back of an in-flight magazine. I n 1741, a retired Dutch sea captain called Douwe Mout van der Meer brought to Rotterdam from India the first live rhinoceros to be seen in mainland Europe since 1579.