The African Caravan
Installed 1994
Down the centre of the great nave marches a procession of African animals, led by an elephant with its trunk raised. Behind it come giraffes, a rhinoceros, buffalo, zebras, antelopes, a hippopotamus, lions, hyenas and dozens of smaller creatures, as if the whole savannah had set out together toward a waterhole. There are no glass cases. The animals stand on a long open platform at eye level, and children walk alongside them as though joining the herd. Above, the vast glass roof and the coloured lighting shift slowly through the tones of a day from dawn to dusk.
The animals themselves are old. Many were mounted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some collected on colonial expeditions, and they were cleaned, restored and in some cases restuffed for the reopening of the gallery in 1994. Look closely at the differences in craftsmanship: the giraffes are stately and stiff, the lions are more lifelike, the smaller antelopes show every muscle. The point of the display is not a habitat diorama but a lesson in diversity, the sheer range of shapes that evolution has produced in a single landscape.
The hall itself, designed by Louis Jules André and opened in 1889 as the Galerie de Zoologie, had been closed for nearly thirty years by the 1990s, with its specimens rotting under a leaking roof. The architects Paul Chemetov and Borja Huidobro rebuilt the interior and lowered the floor of the nave, and the museum reopened it as the Grande Galerie de l'Évolution. The caravan is its signature image, and the elephant at its head, so the story goes, is the most photographed animal in Paris.
Did You Know? The gallery's lighting is programmed to run through a full cycle of daylight, storm and night, so the caravan looks different depending on when you stand beside it.
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