Oudry's Painted Menagerie by Mary Morton

Happily the young queen-Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whom George III had married the previous year-was able to provide alternative accommodation. A few monkeys, some predatory birds and small animals in cages were also kept there herbivores as a general rule were not. But the facilities at the Lion Tower-the half-moon of iron-grated dens, the stone-paved exercise yards designed as a living and breeding space for lions and other carnivores-were harsh and unforgiving. (3) That grim fortress had been a repository for the monarch's foreign beasts since the Middle Ages indeed until late in the 18th century it was the only stationary place in Britain where a variety of exotic wild animals could be publicly viewed. (2) A place was prepared for it in the Tower of London. Described initially as a 'wild Ass, finely marked like a Tyger', (1) and often spoken of since as the first zebra to be seen alive in England, it was presented by the ship's commander to the queen. In June 1762 a female zebra, brought as a deck passenger on HMS Terpsichore from the Cape of Good Hope, arrived in London. I also identify John Morgan, one of the attendant Indians in Stubbs's Portrait of a hunting tyger. Here I have chosen to examine the lives (including in one case the afterlife) of those captive animals so sumptuously portrayed: how they arrived in the country, with the subsequent threads of ownership, display and exploitation as far as they can be recovered, and in records not previously studied. Three exotic animals-Queen Charlotte's zebra, the Duke of Marlborough's tiger, George Pigot's cheetah -are the subjects of three famous paintings by George Stubbs.

Oudry's Painted Menagerie by Mary Morton