The Wounded Comrade

Carl Ethan Akeley was a well-known naturalist and taxidermist who worked for many years at the American Museum of Natural History (1909-26). After his first trip to Africa in 1896, Akeley conceived the idea of creating a full-scale African diorama to show the animals in their natural habitat. The Wounded Comrade depicts a scene that Akeley had directly observed in the wild: when an elephant is wounded, others from the herd will rush in and attempt to convey it to safety. Akeley's production of art bronzes was the direct result of his working habit of making clay models to design dioramas. A fellow sculptor, Alexander Phimister Proctor (whose works are on exhibition nearby), suggested that Akeley cast a series of these models into bronze. The first and most famous work in the series is The Wounded Comrade.