At the 
The Nature Faker 
Until her retirement last April, Fred- 
erica Leser worked on the top floor of 
the American Museum in a sunny, clut- 
tered corner of the exhibition studios. 
She recently returned for a retirement 
tea, and as she sat at her desk, she 
talked about her experiences at the Mu- 
seum. A handsome and direct woman 
with gray hair and a tanned face, Leser 
worked as an artist in the Exhibition 
Department for twenty-one years. Her 
specialty was painting, with great skill, 
casts of fishes, amphibians, and reptiles 
for exhibition halls. Using glazes, wash- 
es, metallic paints, lacquers, and oils, 
she re-created the silvery sheen of salm- 
on, the neon colors of tropical fishes, 
the warm ochers of pythons and rattle- 
snakes, the azures and dusty greens of 
lizards, and the glossy blacks and reds 
of salamanders. 
Leser began painting animal casts for 
the Hall of Ocean Life and then moved 
to the Hall of Reptiles and Amphib- 
ians. She also built models and pre- 
pared artificial leaves, grasses, and 
other odds and ends for dioramas and 
habitat groups. Her last major project 
was painting the murals, frescoes, and 
complex, interlocking designs in the 
new Hall of Asian Peoples. 
“I did a couple of pythons and most 
of the other animals for the Hall of 
Reptiles and Amphibians,” she ex- 
plained. She rummaged through a pile 
of blown-up photographs and pulled 
out one that showed her hunched over 
the cast of an enormous snake coiled 
about a pile of eggs. “This python was 
cast live. She was anesthetized and 
coiled about these python eggs to show 
how she incubates. I painted every scale 
many times to build up the color 
through multiple glazes. If you’ve ever 
seen one of these things alive, you know 
what rich, deep colors they have. You 
can’t just paint the thing once and have 
it look real. When you’re nature-faking, 
you get a sense of just how beautiful 
these animals are. They’re a tremen- 
dous challenge for an artist. 
“The twenty-five-foot reticulated py- 
thon in the hall was the first snake I did. 
We had an old mounted python that 
had been around for years, never paint- 
ed or finished, looking just like a piece 
of dirty brown leather. When I started 
painting it, I made several trips to the 
zoo to get the colors exactly right. I re- 
member one time I wanted to see the 
color of the belly, and someone brought 
out a little ten-foot python — they 
wouldn’t let me see the big ones. I’m 
not afraid of snakes, and I got in very 
close, a little too close I suppose, and 
the zoo keepers shouted at me to ‘get 
back!’ Apparently these sluggish snakes 
have a simply dreadful bite, and they 
strike suddenly and very fast. 
“The first big hall I did was the Hall 
of Ocean Life. I painted 85 to 90 per- 
cent of the fishes in the hall, mostly 
with an air brush. The reptiles require 
more exact brushwork because they 
have a precise, hard-edge quality to 
their coloring. Fishes are softer. They 
ranged from tiny fish the size of your 
thumb to the great white shark. Dave 
Schwendeman, who is the chief taxider- 
mist in exhibition, positioned and cast 
most of the fishes from preserved speci- 
mens. It was Dave who taught me to 
“see” the animals I was trying to repro- 
duce, to realize their subtlety. 
“The colors of live fishes are very 
beautiful and deep — and difficult to 
capture in paint. We used a lot of pearl- 
escence and washes and metallic paints 
to give them those special silvery and 
shining fish colors. Finding the exact 
colors to use was a problem. The color 
leaches out of preserved fish, although 
they keep their markings. You really 
need to look at live or freshly killed 
fishes, since they lose their color so fast. 
Some colors — I hate to admit it — we 
had to guess at. All we knew about the 
Chinese river fish was that they were 
the color of mud. As you know, mud 
comes in many colors — brown, red, 
black, gray, or whatever. We painted 
our fish brown. With the Chinese dele- 
gations touring the museum, we’re just 
waiting to hear how the river fish are all 
the wrong color. We spent six or seven 
years painting the fishes in that hall. 
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