Walter Potter’s Two-Faced Kitten at the Morbid Anatomy Museum

Eccentric Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter’s famous two-faced kitten taxidermy comes to the Morbid Anatomy Museum.

Photo by Chris Bradley via Morbid Anatomy

This month the Morbid Anatomy Museum is bringing Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter’s two-faced kitten to the public…for the first time ever in the US!

Walter Potter began creating whimsical anthropomorphic taxidermy dioramas in 1854 at the age of 19 with his first piece, The Death and Burial of Cock Robin. He spent his life filling his family-owned pub, The White Lion in Bramber, with amazing and whimsical scenes. Potter’s work also included examples of nature gone wrong, such as four-legged chicks and a two-headed lamb.

In 2003, however, Potter’s Bramber Museum collection was auctioned off and scattered all over the world into private collections.

The kitten, from the collection of Karen Holzner, will be displayed along with numerous other extraordinary objects in the first of a series of exhibits called The Collector’s Cabinet. Other oddities will include an anthropomorphic taxidermy squirrel bar scene from Wisconsin’s own Cress Funeral Home presented by Mike Zohn, a Beauchene skull by Ryan Matthew Cohn, and more.

Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein, who will present the kitten, is the co-author of Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy.

You can find more on The Collector’s Cabinet and other upcoming exhibitions right here.