Clara (rhinoceros)

After tours through towns in the Dutch Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, France, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Papal States, Bohemia and Denmark, she died in Lambeth, England.

[1] In 1738, aged approximately one month, Clara was adopted by Jan Albert Sichterman in India after her mother was killed by Indian hunters somewhere in Assam.

In 1740, Sichterman either sold or gave her as a gift to Douwe Mout van der Meer, captain of the Knappenhof, who returned to the Netherlands with Clara.

The exhibitions were so successful that Douwe Mout van der Meer left the VOC in 1744 to tour Europe with his rhinoceros.

The tour continued to Frankfurt an der Oder, Breslau, and Vienna, where Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria-Theresa saw her on 5 November.

In 1747, she travelled to Regensburg, Freiberg and Dresden, where she posed for Johann Joachim Kaendler from the Meissen porcelain factory and was visited on 19 April by Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.

She was in Leipzig on 23 April for Easter, and visited the orangery of the castle of Kassel at the invitation of Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse.

Clara was examined by the naturalist Buffon, Jean-Baptiste Oudry painted a life-size portrait of her, and she inspired the French Navy to name a vessel Rhinocéros in 1751.

A drawing based on Oudry's painting appeared in Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie, and Buffon's Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière.

Avoiding the fate of Dürer's Rhinoceros, which drowned in a shipwreck off the Ligurian coast near Porto Venere in 1516, Clara visited Naples and Rome.