The Rhino that Made the Grand Tour -- Twice!

It's not easy being an international celebrity; you need a thick skin. Luckily, Clara was a rhinoceros. 

But even though she was feted as she toured Europe, Clara lived a lonely life. Her mother was killed when she was captured by hunters in Assam at the age of just one month in 1738. For the next 20 years until her death, she never saw another rhino. She can't actually have known what she looked like. 

The story of this 18th-century animal superstar is told at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in Clara the Rhinoceros. It's an exhibition for art-lovers, animal-lovers and history-lovers, and it's absolutely fascinating and fun. 

And let's introduce you to the star of the show: Clara herself.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry painted her in Paris in 1749, life-size. She was 11 years old, 3.6 metres long and 1.7 metres tall; and she weighed more than 2 1/2 tonnes. Yes, that painting is life-size; just try to imagine it on your wall. 

What made Clara so special? Well, hardly anyone in 18th-century Europe had seen such an exotic animal. People knew about rhinos, and they thought they knew what they looked like, but they were wrong. No accurate depictions of the creatures existed in the west. 

Until then everyone had relied on the print by Albrecht Dürer for their image of a rhinoceros, apparently armour-plated. 

But the German artist never saw the live animal that was brought from India and given to King Manuel of Portugal in Lisbon in 1515, and he was dependent on a description to create his famous picture. The woodcut illustration states at the top that "it has the colour of a speckled tortoise and it is covered with thick scales. It is like an elephant in size, but lower on its legs and almost invulnerable. It has a strong sharp horn on its nose which it sharpens on stones." Dürer also added a second horn, twisted like that of a unicorn, where the neck meets the shoulders. 

Dürer's works were distributed across Europe. And more than two centuries later, he still provided the blueprint for this metre-long Meissen porcelain rhinoceros created for the Duke of Saxony, second horn included. 

And then Clara came along. The baby rhino was presented to the director of the Dutch East India Company in Bengal, where she was treated as a pet, mingling with dinner guests. But when she grew bigger, she was passed on to Captain Douwe Mout, who took her with him when he sailed home to the Netherlands at the end of 1740. 

Back in Europe, Clara is a sensation. Mout is an enterprising man, and shows his rhinoceros off to all comers, for a fee naturally. All across the continent, for 17 years. Clara travelled from city to city, across mountains and rivers, in a wooden carriage that needed eight horses to draw it. She went as far north as Copenhagen, right down to Naples, all over Germany in two grand multi-year tours.... and ended her days worn out in London. 

Everywhere, artists and scientists sought her out, to paint her, draw her, measure her. She was, after all, unique, at least in Europe. Here she is in Venice in 1751, (rather smaller than true-to-scale) in front of a partly masked audience. The more you paid, the closer you got. Pietro Longhi was commissioned to paint two pictures of Clara with prominent families -- the spot-the-difference version is in London's National Gallery.

Mout, or his assistant, is holding up Clara's horn, which had dropped off in Rome a few months earlier (stress?). Clara ate 60 pounds of hay and 20 pounds of bread a day and drank 14 buckets of water. And someone had to clean up after her....

Mout ran a formidable publicity operation. The visits were announced in advance with handbills, complete with pictures of her; commemorative medals were struck. In Paris, Clara was shown by royal appointment. She was on display 10 hours a day, from 10 in the morning till 8 at night. Fashionable ladies had their hair styled à la rhinocéros, though unfortunately we don't get to see what that looked like. 

All rhinos have poor eyesight, so the captive Clara probably never clearly saw the untold thousands of visitors making her owner a rich man. 

But Clara would not just be a transient phenomenon. She would live on, in many forms. Marble, for example, as in this particularly lifelike-looking sculpture assumed to have been made by court artist Pieter Antoon Verschaffelt in Mannheim, shortly after her death. The proportions are exact, and those folds around the neck must have been tricky to get right.

There will have been cheap souvenirs of a day out to see the rhinoceros, and more expensive ones. Clara went to Dresden in April 1747, and this time the porcelain modellers in nearby Meissen had the chance to work from life. A few years later Meissen was manufacturing rhinos with exotic Turkish and Chinese-style figures. 

Paris clockmaker Jean-Joseph de Saint-Germain made exclusive timepieces for the elite, and what could be more tasteful than this bronze Clara, ears apparently pricked up to hear the tick of the clock. 

It's a clock fit for a duchess -- you can see a very similar one on the right of this picture, painted by Laurent Pecheux in 1765 to mark the marriage of the 13-year-old Maria Luisa of Bourbon-Parma to her cousin, the 16-year-old Crown Prince Carlos of Spain. 

We really enjoyed this show. Poor Clara, though, what an existence. Still at least she never had to appear on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. 

Practicalities

Clara the Rhinoceros runs at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until January 15. It's open daily from 0900 to 1700. Full-price tickets to the museum, including the show, are 20 euros and need to be booked online with a start time here. Give yourself 45-50 minutes to find out all about Clara; before you get to her there's another animal-related exhibition about Crawly Creatures, if that's your sort of thing.   

The gallery is situated in the museum quarter in the south-west of the city centre and is easily accessible by tram, using Vijzelgracht Metro station or via a direct bus from Schiphol airport. 9292.nl is an excellent site that gives you public-transport connections across the Netherlands.

While you're in the Rijksmuseum

Visit the Gallery of Honour for the museum's line-up of the greatest works from its Dutch Golden Age collection. You will have to battle the crowds; this is the most visited museum in the Netherlands. Pride of place goes, of course, to Rembrandt's The Night Watch, currently being restored live in situ behind a glass screen. But don't miss, either, three stunning works by Vermeer: The Milkmaid, Woman Reading a Letter and, sometimes overlooked by the camera-clicking crowd among all the other masterpieces on display, The Love Letter. 

Elsewhere in Amsterdam

At the Van Gogh Museum, just a stone's throw from the Rijksmuseum, you can find out how Golden Boy Gustav Klimt drew inspiration from a wide range of contemporary artists, including Munch and Manet, to create his magical portraits and landscapes.    

Images

Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Rhinoceros, 1749, Staatliches Museum Schwerin

Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, 1515, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (note: the print on display in the Rijksmuseum is from the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig)
Johann Gottlieb Kirchner, Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, Rhinoceros, 1731, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden 
Pietro Longhi, Il Rinoceronte, 1751, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia Ca' Rezzonico, Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Venice
Attributed to Pieter Antoon Verschaffelt, Rhinoceros (Clara), 1760-70, The Rothschild Foundation, Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire
J-J Saint-Germain and F Viger, Clock with rhinoceros as carrier, 1755, Parnassia Collection, Amsterdam
Laurent Pecheux, Portrait of Maria Luisa de Bourbon-Parma, 1765, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence