The Hippopotamus at the Zoological Gardens, Regent's Park

Although his childhood was spent at the court of his uncle Fernando VII, the king of Spain, Prince Juan de Borbón spent the major part of his life in England, in exile following his father's violent challenge to the succession of Fernando's daughter Isabel II in 1833. Apparently harboring no royal ambitions, Juan assumed the somewhat obscure title of Count de Montizon in public and, when the dubious title of pretender to the Spanish throne passed to him from his elder brother, he renounced all claim in favor of Queen Isabel. His passions, instead, ran to physics, chemistry, and natural history; photography, it seems, was an appropriate amateur pursuit that combined all three interests.

This photograph was the Count de Montizon's contribution to "The Photographic Album for the Year 1855," a publication of the Royal Photographic Society's Photographic Exchange Club. The accompanying text reads: "This animal was captured in August 1849, when quite young, on the banks of the White Nile; and was sent over to England by the Pasha of Egypt as a present to Queen Victoria. He arrived at Southampton on May 25, 1850; and on the evening of the same day was safely housed in the apartment prepared for him at the Zoological Gardens, where he has ever since been an object of great attraction."

The animals of the Zoological Gardens were a favorite subject for the count's demonstrations of photography's capacity to arrest movement in photographs "taken on collodion with a double lens, by instantaneous exposure" (as he wrote in the technical caption for this picture). If the notion of instantaneity seems incongruous in this picture of a sluggish and corpulent hippo, it is perhaps better seen in the curious spectators who, from the photographer's vantage point, appear to be the zoo's caged inhabitants.