Henry, the African Bush Elephant
Collected 1955; mounted 1959
You cannot miss him. As you walk in from the Mall, a bull African elephant rises in the centre of the rotunda, trunk lifted, ears spread, one foot raised as if he is about to step down off his platform and into the crowd. He stands about four metres at the shoulder and is one of the largest mounted elephants anywhere. Staff and visitors call him Henry, a nickname that stuck after a museum contest, and he has become the symbol of the museum, the point where families agree to meet and where every school group takes its photograph.
The animal was shot in Angola in 1955 by the Hungarian-born big game hunter Josef Fenykovi, who had it skinned in the field and shipped the hide, weighing about two tonnes, to Washington. Museum taxidermists led by William Brown spent sixteen months building the mount over a hand-sculpted armature, working from photographs and measurements to get the tense posture right. Look at the wrinkles of the skin around the trunk and legs, which were carefully preserved, and at the tusks, which are replicas, since the real ivory would be too heavy and too tempting. The elephant was unveiled in 1959. In 2015 the pedestal was redesigned to show a savanna waterhole with grasses, birds and a trail of footprints, and the display now includes information on ivory poaching and elephant conservation.
Stand under the dome and look up before you look at the elephant, because the rotunda itself, eighty feet across and rising to a coffered ceiling, was designed to frame just such a centrepiece. The elephant's raised trunk was chosen to suggest alarm, the moment when a bull senses something in the wind. It gives a slightly unsettling energy to what is otherwise a grand and calm room, which is exactly what the taxidermists intended.
Did You Know? The elephant's hide alone weighed about two tonnes when it arrived from Angola, and the tusks on display are replicas.
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