The Zoo (London) –Watching the Polar Bears. LL (Lévy et Fils). 1905. Photographic postcard. Courtesy of John Edwards, London

Forty years after Landseer studied London Zoo’s polar bears for his Arctic fantasy Man Proposes, God Disposes (also in this exhibition), this photograph reveals the truth of their living conditions. The stark concrete enclosure with its small pool and den had been built in 1844 and was used to house polar bears until 1910.  

This image is one of an extensive London Zoo series by the prolific French photographic postcard firm ‘LL’ (Lévy et Fils). It is a striking but strange composition, evidently more interested in the row of tourists seen from the back than the pair of young bears, ‘Sam’, a male (purchased 1903, shot at the Zoo in 1925 due to illness) and ‘Barbara’, a female (purchased 1904, died 1923), who are dimly glimpsed behind them. One bear is as far away from its onlookers as it can get, stretching up to sniff the air, trying to work out what is beyond its cage.  

From 1900-25 at least 29 polar bears passed through the Zoo. Sam and Barbara, a breeding pair, were responsible for 13 of these, though, as with nearly all polar bears born in captivity in this period, none survived long. All the adults exhibited were born in the wild and captured as cubs. This was just a tiny part of the international polar bear trade. Astonishingly, in December 1909, the renowned German animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck brought 70 trained polar bears to perform at the London Hippodrome in The Arctic - a spectacle referencing the loss of the Franklin expedition.   

Seemingly a minor exhibit in Landseer’s day, by this time the polar bears in the Zoo had become public ‘favourites’. Barbara especially emerges as a compelling character, variously described as small, strong, vicious and untrainable, a ‘pet’ of the ladies and children when a cub, and a sensually powerful creature with ‘rippling muscles’ when grown. Like the bears studied by Landseer, however, Sam and Barbara were also famed for their restless pacing, and for their failure to raise their cubs. Both bears were slandered as ‘unnatural parents’ who neglected and sometimes ate their infants. This behaviour is common in unhappy captive animals, as some contemporaries recognised. Constance Pocock, the wife of the Zoo’s then superintendent, knew that many cubs died from exposure because Barbara would not remain in her den, and was unusually empathetic about her unhappiness at raising cubs in an ‘artificial environment’: ‘what [is] more likely than that she should obey a natural instinct[,] and try to carry the cubs with her in search of more congenial surroundings?’ 

That this postcard was considered an acceptable souvenir of the experience of ‘watching the polar bears’ tells us a great deal. Changing attitudes eventually sparked a desire to improve their housing, and in 1913 Sam and Barbara were installed as the star exhibit of the new Mappin Terraces, a concrete diorama designed to look like a natural landscape, but which, unsurprisingly, prioritised attractiveness to visitors over real benefits to animal health and happiness. 

Essay by Alison Wright