Art: Walter Potter created incredible human scenes from tiny taxidermy animals

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was part of our It’s Mice That takeover on April Fools’ Day 2014. You can read our explanation post here or peruse the mice archive here.

Taxidermy is something of an under-represented art on It’s Nice That – we tend to prefer our animals alive and perched atop a velveteen cushion, or strolling through the pages of a cat-themed magazine, to dead and stuffed and popped in a fancy glass cage. That is, of course, unless the man responsible for said stuffing and popping is Walter Potter, the English taxidermist who created elaborate landscapes from lovingly anthropomorphised animals that mimic scenes from human life.

A group of mice hanging out in an underground bar where a tiny little mouse policeman pokes his head round the door, for example, or a pair of little birds carrying a third in a coffin on their shoulder in the cutest, weirdest funeral procession we’ve ever seen. It’s basically like he’s brought a Beatrix Potter story to life, and we couldn’t love him more for it.