George Marchand

George Marchand, son of French-American artists Clothilde and Henri Marchand, was internationally admired for his dioramas and other museum displays. He began working on zoological and botanical exhibits with his father as a teenager. The family moved to Buffalo in 1925, and Henri, George, and George’s brother Paul all took positions at the Buffalo Science Museum, which was in the process of preparing a new space that opened to the public in 1929. The brothers, who lived in Ebeneezer, N.Y., remained at the museum until 1943 before moving on to other institutions.

In a May 1946 article on George and his brother, a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter described the spectacle of an actual bee landing on one of their trompe l’oeil creations: "The Marchands can make almost anything, including flowers, so real that even the bees are fooled. It was nothing to fool the layman with their artificial flowers. In fact, it was nothing to fool the experts. But this was the first time they had hoodwinked nature itself." [1]

George Marchand took a teaching position at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he worked until retirement, at which point he moved to Missouri. He died in 2000.

[1] Quoted in Mark Sommer, “Dioramas and the Buffalo Connection,” Buffalo News, 03/31/2009, http://www.buffalonews.com/article/20090331/LIFE/303319949. (Accessed 04/08/2014)