Carlton Hobbs: Howdah you hunt a tiger?

This unusual mirror in the Carlton Hobbs collection once hung in The Star Inn, a Victorian public house located at 2 Quarry Street, Guildford, Surrey. According to Matthew Alexander, former curator of the Guildford Museum: “[The mirror hung] on the south wall of the Court Room at The Star, above the fireplace. The Court Room is a large function room at the rear of the premises, built in the 1840s. It took its name as the meeting room of the ‘Guildford Castle Court’ of the Ancient Order of Foresters, founded there in 1858 (the treasurer was the pub’s landlord, Jesse Boxall)…the name has led many in later years to speculate that it was used for a legal court – it never was.” The Pilgrim Morris Men of Guildford were kind enough to dig around their archives for us, and found a photo of one of their members standing in front of the mirror when it stood in The Star Inn.

The mirror is decorated using a technique called verre églomisé, also called ‘reverse glass painting’ or ‘back painting.’ Glass is ornamented on its underside, either by painting or gilding, and then covered by another layer of glass, varnish, or mirror plate. The technique dates to ancient Roman times, but was made popular in England through trade with the China in the 18th century. Until the technique of glass-making was improved in the East, plain glass needed to be sent from England to China and then exported back once decorated. The present mirror, however, is an interesting and later exercise in the technique completed entirely by English hands.

The scene depicted on the mirror involves an elephant driven by a mahout and carrying a Western hunter, presumably through the jungles of India, in the howdah on its back. A howdah is a carriage-like compartment strapped to the back of an elephant and was used in the 19th and early 20th centuries as a firing platform in hunting, or as a mode of transportation to carry the wealthy during British Colonial rule (Below, a photograph circa 1911 shows King George V riding in a howdah on a hunting excursion in Nepal). The hunter here is aiming his rifle at a leopard that has attacked and is clinging to the rear of the elephant. Several publications of the period illustrate similar scenarios as that depicted on the present mirror, and express the danger of tigers and other prey attacking hunting parties. These British hunting expeditions in colonial India were a spectacle in Victorian and early Edwardian England England, contemporaneous both with the painting of the mirror and the outfitting of The Star.

Thankfully, humane organizations, such as PETA, are working hard to outlaw many of the similarly cruel “sports” that are still carried on today.