A Career Bringing Natural History to Life

Robert Caplin for The New York Times Stephen Quinn, the senior diorama artist at the American Museum of Natural History, is retiring after nearly 40 years at the museum.

“I’m in my work clothes,” Stephen Christopher Quinn said as he smoothed a dark blue apron splotched with paint. “I’ve got to finish two murals by Friday.”

Standing in front of the buffalo diorama that he had restored, he meant to sound apologetic, but he sounded busy. He is the da Vinci of dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, its Botticelli of birds, its Renoir of rhinoceroses. As the museum’s senior diorama artist, he has masterminded the scenes that make the crowds ooh and ahhh: the big blue whale, the huge coral reef, the gorillas beating their chests, the archaeopteryx, the acanthostega.

Those last two are in one of the fourth-floor dinosaur halls. You cannot mention the museum’s dioramas without mentioning its dinosaurs â€" in this case the archaeopteryx, a bird that bridged the evolutionary gap between dinosaurs that had feathers and latter-day birds. Or the acanthostega, an extinct creature that must have looked like a small alligator. It was one of the first to have distinct, recognizable limbs and hands with eight digits, if you counted them. Mr. Quinn, who is nothing if not precise, did.

Now, at 62, Mr. Quinn has decided to retire after nearly 40 years of creating the museum’s behind-glass environments (and many that were out in the open). His last day at work is Friday. He will become an “exhibition associate,” having a first-of-its-kind title conferred by the museum’s scientific staff, but retirement will give him time to do limited-edition paintings and to work on an urban nature center adjacent to his home in New Jersey.

So the pressure was on to finish background paintings for an exhibition on poison â€" a tropical rain forest like one in Colombia.

“What people don’t realize is these aren’t just generalized scenes,” he said on Monday. “It’s not just an artist getting together with a curator at the museum. The museum has a set protocol of actually going to a place and replicating that place.”

It is a boots-on-the-ground approach that sent him off to see polar bears on the frozen Chukchi Sea off Alaska and killer whales in what he calls the “rosy sunset waters” off the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia.

Mr. Quinn, who arrived at the museum as an intern artist in 1974, went on to write the book on the museum’s dioramas â€" literally. “Windows on Nature” is a full-color volume that says dioramas are relics. They are not as old as their subjects, perhaps, but they are an art form that predates television and movies. “They were powerful forms of virtual reality” before 3-D glasses and DVRs, Mr. Quinn said.

It turns out that the term “diorama” was coined by Louis Daguerre, who used his name as the basis for another coinage, the daguerreotype, an early commercial photographic process. Daguerre created the first dioramas, in 1822, as theater sets in Europe.

In the book, Mr. Quinn wrote that the most frequently asked question of a diorama artist is, “Is it real” The second-most frequently asked is, “How do you get in to water the plants”

The answers are, “Not necessarily” (some plant specimens are in there, but not every leaf that you see is real, and the animals have been stuffed) and “You don’t” (the dioramas are sealed).

To open a diorama and redo it is a once-in-a-lifetime project. He relished those, starting with his very first assignment, working on the foreground of the wood stork diorama in the Hall of North American Birds.

He was good at birds, thanks to what he called a “Tom Sawyerlike childhood in the New Jersey Meadowlands” in the 1950s and 1960s, before the world knew it just for a sports complex. It helped that his older brother, John R. Quinn, had raised mallards, wood ducks, wigeon and bobwhite quail in the backyard. Together they learned to paint them. John went on to paint a mural of Alexander the Great on their bedroom wall.

“On his horse, marching to the Mediterranean,” Mr. Quinn said. (John grew up to become a museum exhibit artist for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and later a naturalist with the Hackensack Meadowlands Commission. He died last year.)

Stephen Quinn’s travels have taken him far from home in Ridgefield Park, N.J., where he still lives in the same house â€" and where the Alexander the Great mural is still on the same wall. In 2010, he went to the Democratic Republic of Congo, retracing the steps of Carl Akeley, a pioneering taxidermist who did many of the museum’s dioramas in the early 20th century.

Mr. Quinn camped on Mount Mikeno, where Akeley had camped on his first gorilla expedition in 1921.

“You’re up 11,000 feet,” he said. “The volcanoes are still active, so at night there’s this brilliant vermilion color. But the first night we were there, we had snow flurries as we were pitching our tent and starting our fire, which was remarkable for equatorial Africa. You just assume you’re in the steaming rain forest, but it got cold.”

But the prize for an artist â€" a glimpse of his subject â€" eluded him: “The gorillas are wary of people.”