Lola’s Menagerie

Abstract

For much of Western history, the menagerie was a privilege of the aristocracy. Colonies provided not only luxury goods and wealth but also exotic animals that were collected and held in cages. Seventeenth-century artists such as Melchior de Hondecoeter (1636–95), who created large canvases with birds and other animals that mimicked the genre of the history painting, had access to the menageries of their royal patrons. Beginning in the eighteenth century and increasingly in the nineteenth, menageries were opened to a wider public and the first zoos were established. The Central Park Zoo in New York dates to 1860. There are lines of affinity between the fortunes of Lola Montez and the democratization of the menagerie.