Rhinomania

I learn, via A. G. Van der Steur , a Dutch antiquarian, that Death's rhino had a name! She was called Clara, and she was the fifth rhino to reach Europe alive, arriving on the a vessel captained by one Douwe Mout van der Meer, on July 22nd, 1741. Van der Meer soon began to exhibit Clara in his home town of Leiden, and elsewhere in the Netherlands, and eventually developed a full-scale Rhino Grand Tour of Europe. Albinus and his artist Jan Wandelaar saw Clara in Amsterdam, and adopted her, the first rhino in Western art to be drawn from the life, as an emblem for their atlas of the living human body. For sixteen years, until she died at the age of 21, Clara was the centre of a European rhinoceros-craze, attracting the attention of many thousands of people, including such notables as Casanova, and the great naturalist Buffon - here she is, as depicted in Buffon's Histoire Naturelle :

(image found at the George Glazer Gallery).

Perhaps the most famous image of her, though, is Pietro Longhi's, of 1751:

(image found at the Web Galley of Art, via Art 4 2Day)

I particularly like Longhi's attention to the animal's dung, I suupose as a way of guaranteeing her earthy reality.