The Verreaux Legacy

Stories from the Museum: The Forgotten Years

During my time working at the South African Museum, I found myself drawn into the dusty corners of its institutional history, specifically the period often referred to as the "Forgotten Years." In the old ledgers and commemorative histories published for the museum's 150th anniversary by Roger Summers in 1975, two names caught my eye, listed almost as footnotes to the great Sir Andrew Smith. There it was in black and white: Jules Verreaux, described simply as "Keeper" from 1830 to 1838, and later, Joseph Alexis Verreaux, noted as an intermittent taxidermist between 1855 and 1859. The official records were sparse, almost clinical, but as I began to dig deeper into the archives, a far more complex and colourful narrative emerged—one of a French family whose lives were inextricably linked to the birth of South African natural history, often through methods that would be unthinkable today.

Jules Verreaux’s arrival at the Cape was not the entrance of a seasoned professional, but that of an eleven-year-old prodigy. In 1818, he accompanied his uncle, the naturalist Pierre-Antoine Delalande, on a massive two-year collecting expedition. The sheer volume of what they took back to Paris is staggering: over 131,000 specimens, ranging from a skeleton  of a 75-foot whale  stranded at False Bay to thousands of insects and plants. It was Jules’s baptism by fire in the art of preservation. By the time he returned to the Cape as an adult in 1825, he wasn't just a collector; he was a master of the "theatrical" style of taxidermy, which sought to capture animals in dynamic, often violent, moments of life.

When Jules was appointed "Keeper" of the museum in 1830, he inherited an institution with essentially zero funding. Andrew Smith, the Superintendent, was on the Army payroll, and the colonial grant was so pitiful it couldn't even cover the cost of basic cabinets. Jules, therefore, existed on a precarious financial edge. He received no salary from the museum; instead, his livelihood depended entirely on the one-shilling entrance fees collected at the door and his private profits as a taxidermist for hire. To keep the enterprise afloat, he turned the museum into a sort of hybrid between a scientific laboratory and a commercial showroom for the family business, Maison Verreaux.

The research into Jules’s tenure reveals a man of immense skill but questionable ethics. His most notorious act occurred during this period. In 1830, while traveling near the Orange and Vaal Rivers, he witnessed the burial of a Tswana warrior. Under the cover of night, Jules returned to the grave and exhumed the body. He applied his taxidermy skills to the remains, using metal wire for a spine and newspaper for stuffing, and shipped the man back to Paris as a "specimen" of the "Bechuana" people. This individual, later known as "El Negro," remained on display in Europe until 2000, a haunting testament to the era’s "scientific racism" where humans were treated as just another branch of the animal kingdom to be stuffed and classified.

While Jules eventually returned to Paris in 1838—suffering a devastating loss when a shipwreck off La Rochelle claimed a massive portion of his personal collection—the family legacy at the Cape was maintained by his younger brother, Alexis. My discovery of Alexis in the museum records from 1855 to 1859 filled in a missing piece of the puzzle. Unlike Jules, who sought the spotlight of Parisian high science, Alexis remained rooted in the colony. He operated a flourishing taxidermy practice in the Eastern Cape and later lived in Durban, but he frequently returned to Cape Town to mount birds and mammals for the South African Museum during the mid-1850s.

Alexis was the craftsman behind the scenes, the man who brought a "lifelike effect" to the specimens that formed the backbone of the museum's permanent collection. It is widely believed that he was the one who mounted the famous sable antelope discovered by the hunter William Cornwallis Harris in 1837. Even as he managed an ammunition shop in Cape Town to pay the bills, Alexis continued to act as a vital conduit, sending natural history specimens back to the family emporium in Paris until his death in 1868. He was the "intermittent" hand that ensured the museum stayed relevant during its most financially lean years.

The Verreaux story, as I found it through those ledger entries, is one of incredible endurance and moral ambiguity. They were the premier providers of natural history to the world, supplying everyone from princes to the Smithsonian. They named species—like the magnificent Verreaux’s Eagle—and revolutionized how we view wildlife in museum dioramas. Yet, they were also "body snatchers" who operated in a time when the pursuit of knowledge often came at the cost of basic human dignity. Seeing Jules and Alexis listed simply as "Keeper" and "Taxidermist" belies the reality that, for nearly forty years, this one family held the keys to how the world saw the wild interior of Southern Africa.