Fred F. Scherer, left, and James Perry Wilson, center, paint the background for the American Bison/Pronghorn antelope diorama in 1942.

Visitors to the American Museum of Natural History look at a diorama for which Scherer painted the background decades prior.

Growing up in and around New York I spent many happy hours at the American Museum of Natural History. In addition to it being the depository of many anthropological, archeological and paleontological wonders, it also successfully brings the outside inside for many city dwellers. One of the ways they effectively did this was through museum dioramas. In the age that preceded high-quality large format photography the dioramas required skilled mural painters to help bring the taxidermic animals “to life”.

Fred F. Scherer died at the age of 98 a few weeks ago. He started working at AMNH at the age of 19, as an apprentice on the iconic mountain gorilla diorama. In memoriam we thank NPR for allowing us to take a closer look at his work.

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We visited the AMNH to photograph some of the installations containing his paintings, and spoke with Stephen C. Quinn, who recently retired as an artist from the museum, and knew Scherer well. Most of Scherer’s paintings were created between the 1940s and ’60s — at a time when city-dwellers may have had little access to nature. Museum artists like Scherer worked to bring nature alive indoors…with the Industrial Revolution underway, and the crowding of city centers, “the only way to really to connect people with the wonder of nature would be to recreate it inside the museum — and the diorama was the medium of choice.”