For a quarter-century, Jack Putnam prepared animals from around the world for display in the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s dioramas.
The museum’s former natural-history curator blended art with science for three dozen of the museum’s exhibits, using detailed photos, precise measurements, a keen eye and deft fingers.
Putnam left the museum in 1975 to mount animals and sculpt bronzes, including a full-size bronze bighorn ram displayed on the Colorado State University campus.
Examples of his work – ibexes, bighorn sheep, exotic cats and one massive polar bear – also enliven a room of his Douglas County home that was built to showcase his skills that have won recognition.
Putnam, now 82, and his wife, Lila, have decided to sell his private collection.
“We’ve had our fun with them. It’s time for someone else to appreciate them,” Putnam said.
Each mount has a story, such as the polar bear near the pool table, where Putnam has been known to give a lesson or two.
Putnam bagged the bear, ranked fifth in Boone and Crockett’s record book, during a 1965 trip to the Arctic Chukchi Sea – but the bear came within feet of bagging him.
His favorite item? “The arrowheads,” Putnam said, telling how he collected them as a teenager during foothills camping jaunts. “I wanted to be an archaeologist.”
Instead, Putnam became a taxidermist, a wildlife photographer, a conservationist, a sculptor and a painter.
The hope is to sell the 39 specimens together. As an idea of what wildlife-art collectors may pay for the lot, the polar bear alone is estimated to be worth a cool $1 million. The whole lot? Perhaps two to three times that.
“I hate the thought of getting rid of everything,” Lila Putnam said with tears welling up.
For the museum and his private work, Jack Putnam hunted the animals, sculpted models, made molds and mounted wildlife with new techniques that breathed life into the creatures.
He took close-ups of eyelids and feathers on birds to get the details right, Lila Putnam said.
All this from a man who never had an art lesson.
“He’s something – I don’t think there’s anybody better,” said Jack Murphy, the museum’s geology curator emeritus.
Murphy’s grandfather, Alfred Bailey, was the museum’s director from 1936 to 1969 and hired Putnam in 1950.
“He hired Jack because he was a ‘museum man,”‘ Murphy said, meaning someone who “could go out in the field when there were expeditions and bring things back for the museum.”
As a teenager, Murphy went on two museum-sponsored expeditions with Putnam – one to Campbell Island, 350 miles south of New Zealand, and the other to the Galápagos Islands.
“He was one of the most- active museum people,” Murphy recalled. “He’d fly to Alaska, go out in the bush and collect animals. It was fun but hard work.”
Looking at his – and nature’s – creations, Putnam said with a trademark smile: “It was a lot of work and gave me a lifetime of adventure.”
Staff writer Ann Schrader can be reached at 303-278-3217 or aschrader@denverpost.com.
