Behind the Glass

Small-boy admirers of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History sometimes call it "the dead zoo." Parents, too, gape and gawk at the floodlit glass cases which the museum describes as its "natural habitat groups." In the shadowy "North American Mammals" wing are windows overlooking a family of grizzly bears dining on ants in Yellowstone National Park, wolves loping after a deer by the glow of northern lights, bull moose fighting in a marsh, and Rocky Mountain goats scrambling sky-high along a cliff.

Such windows were invented at the museum 45 years ago (at the time, the trustees thought they lacked dignity), and have been improved on ever since. Today, their fool-the-eye art is unsurpassed anywhere.

Among the men who make them convincing is tall, bald Perry Wilson, a 60-year-old ex-architect who joined the museum staff when his business went to pot in 1934. Last week, in a secluded hall just back of the battling moose, Wilson was drawing a pond and trees in charcoal on the curved back of an empty display case. "Half a dozen beavers are going in here," he said. "One of them will have just come out of the water, and one will be gnawing a branch--to bring out the teeth."

Nearby hung a model showing how the finished beaver case would look, with trees and leaves merging imperceptibly into the painted background.

"A job like this starts with a field trip," Wilson said. "Once we've decided what we want, off we go--a taxidermist or curator to trap and skin the animals, an accessories man, and a background man like myself." For the beavers, they went to central Michigan, stayed two weeks. Wilson made on-the-spot paintings and supplemented them with color photos. The accessories man collected shrubs and stumps for the foreground, things he could later reproduce in paper, wax and cellulose acetate.

Last week the hard part of the work was under way. Museum cabinetmakers were making sure the beaver case would be dustproof and crackproof. The accessories man was up to his ears in drifts of paper leaves. The taxidermist was trying to decide on an oil to make one of the beavers stay wet-looking (he thought an overdose of Kreml might be the best bet). The electricians were working for a muted, dusky lighting effect. Wilson himself had three months painting ahead on the beaver background.

The team of specialists on the job could be reasonably sure that when it was done not a brush stroke, a clumsily veined leaf, a speck of dust or a beaver hair out of place would mar the illusion of paralyzed reality. Fooling the eye, they agreed, is just a matter of patience and technique.

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