John Gould Tasmanian Tiger Thyalcine Kitchen Towel

John Gould’s The Mammals of Australia is one of the most prestigious and familiar natural history work published in the nineteenth century. The picture of the thylacine pair is the most frequently copied and reproduced image of the species in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is still circulating in various forms today. The lithographic images in Gould's book depict thylacines with dark, slanted eyes and threatening expressions. They operated intertextually with countless other constructions that served to define anything in the vicinity of the East as depraved and other – “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange” (Said). But these prints convey a very different impression of the animal than that expressed in a preparatory drawing for the lithograph now housed in the Earl of Derby’s collection at Knowsley Hall near Liverpool. The drawing was made ‘from life’ by H.C. Richter and it is apparent that it was later transformed to conform to the canons of taste operating in Europe in the nineteenth century. As Gould states in the Introduction to his multi-volume work: "neither the shepherd nor the farmer can be blamed for wishing to rid the island of so troublesome a creature" (Introduction, 1863). The pair of thylacines that were models for the drawing arrived at Regents Park Zoo, London, in 1850. They were the first of the species to be displayed in a European zoo and great excitement accompanied their arrival. Artists and writers invested their representations of the species with particularly obvious signifiers of the exotic, savage and strange. For instance, the large plant beneath Gould’s ‘head of a male’ is not endemic to Tasmania, but is similar to plant species that grow in tropical environments.