Ever since Albrecht Dürer’s captivating, if inaccurate, illustration, Europe has had a fascination with the rhinoceros. Easier to exhibit than foreign megafauna like the elephant or giraffe, more novel in appearance than the feline lion or bovine wildebeest, the rare rhinoceros could tour the continent in crates and cages, stirring up publicity and enthusiasm wherever it went. Though a handful may have cycled through Europe in the excitable days before photography, none became more famous than a certain rhino named Clara.

Born in India in 1738, Clara was only a month old when her mother was killed by hunters. Orphaned, she was adopted by a high-ranking official of the Dutch East India Company, who kept her as a party amusement, allowing her to walk indoors and eat from the dinner table. He soon passed the juvenile animal on to a colleague in the company, a Dutchman named Douwemout van der Meer. Van der Meer, sensing a business opportunity, would go on to serve as Clara’s promoter, agent, and manager for a 17-year European romp, until her death in 1758 at the age of 20.

Dürer’s rhinoceros. Woodcut, 1515. (National Gallery of Art via Wikimedia)

His first obstacle was getting an Indian rhinoceros to survive the six-month sea voyage from Calcutta to the Netherlands. Van der Meer needed to tackle the problem of keeping the large animal hydrated as it sailed far from its humid and tropical home. In the wild, a rhinoceros depends on mud to cover and protect its hide from dehydration. With freshwater being too precious to squander on a long-distance trip, Clara was bathed in fish oil. It probably didn’t smell good, but it was a clever and adequate solution that kept the rhinoceros healthy through its many years of life in an alien climate.

A benefit to those aboard was that Clara was not yet fully grown, and thereby required less food and restraint. Having barely grown up alongside other rhinoceroses, Clara was impressionable and comfortable around her human handlers, and her general calm in front of the jeering European masses became a veritable asset. A source of amusement, the crew on board shared their rations of ale with her, beginning for Clara an acquired taste she would appreciate all her life. She also developed, perhaps around this time, an attraction to secondhand tobacco smoke.

Clara first set foot on Europe soil on July 22, 1741, in Rotterdam, becoming the first live rhinoceros to walk on the continent in over 150 years. Little time was wasted in showing her off, and in the following years she toured Amsterdam, Leiden, and other areas of the Dutch Republic. In 1744, Douwemout van der Meer resigned his post as ship captain for Dutch East India Company to exploit his monopoly to the fullest. Clara became an international act, exhibited first in Hamburg and then in Brussels.

Van der Meer enlisted a large wagon, carried by eight horses and reinforced with an iron rim around the wheels, to transport the four-thousand-pound animal across unforgiving 18th-century roads. Keeping Clara happy meant providing her with rest between travels and managing her aggression through her 45-day hormonal cycle. For sustenance, Clara required some 70 pounds of hay, 25 pounds of bread, and 14 buckets of water per day.

Clara toured dozens of central European cities in the coming years, including Berlin, Hanover, Leipzig, Vienna, Strasbourg, Nuremberg, Zurich, and Frankfurt. Along the way she caught the attention of the kings of Prussia and Poland as well as Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. Royalty’s obsession with the rhinoceros turned out to provide a certain boon for Clara—only the wealthiest on the continent could afford to maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep orange orchards, and Clara loved eating oranges. In 1749, she was brought to the menagerie at Versailles, where Van der Meer offered to sell Clara to King Louis XV (he was rejected; the asking price was too high).

Clara in Venice, 1751. Painted by Pietro Longhi. (Wikimedia)

Douwemout van der Meer did not leave behind a journal, but the evidence accounts for a shrewd business mind adept at marketing a novelty. Clara’s likeness leaves behind at least two major paintings: one by Rococo painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and another by Pietro Longhi, this time depicting Clara eating hay in her pen in front of Venetian spectators during carnival. By her side stands a gesticulating barker, brandishing her horn that had fallen off in Rome.

As part of the cultural interest, anatomist Jan Wandelaar depicted Clara next to a human skeleton for comparison, available in anterior and posterior perspectives. Those artists who scrambled to capture Clara’s appearance provided models for study that were passed down through the decades.

Van der Meer channeled Clara’s wide publicity, generating a small fortune through the sale of souvenirs. Viewers of the live animal could take home woodcuts, or if they were in for higher-end inventory, engravings or tin medallions.

Ancillary to Van der Meer’s business model were the many artisans and manufacturers who used Clara’s likeness in their own work. The rhinoceros appeared in bronze statues and on the snuffboxes of the rich. French artisans made pendules au rhinoceros, elaborate clocks bearing tribute to the beast-in-vogue. Meissen-factory artisan Johann Kändler made porcelain models of Clara, and paid Van der Meer a fee for the sitting.

Her five months in Paris provoked a cultural fancy that inspired songs, letters, and poems. It even inaugurated the audacious feminine hairstyle, à la rhinoceros.

Clara soon after toured Italy to great fanfare, and spent the last leg of her nearly twenty-year tour in England. “To be seen, at The Horse and Groom in Lambeth-Market, the surprising, great and noble animal called Rinoceros alive,” advertised a London poster in 1758, right before her death. She expired there, in Lambeth, and her body was happily pried, flensed, and dissected by local natural philosophers. She was a curiosity to the very end.