Black bass, catfish, and lumpfish models prepared by Dwight Franklin

Actor Glenn Hunter and Dwight Franklin, from a 1923 magazine

George Dwight Franklin (1888 – 1971) was an American artist, taxidermist, naturalist, museum curator, and costume designer for early Hollywood films.

Personal life

Dwight Franklin was born on January 28, 1888, in New York City. He married Mary C. McCall Jr., novelist and screenwriter, in January 1928. They divorced in February 1943 and he married Eliza Moultrie Franklin in 1947. The two remained married until his death.^[1][2]

Sometime between 1920 and 1925, Dwight Franklin joined nearly 250 bohemians in signing The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door at Frank Shay's Bookshop on Christopher Street. The door is now held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and Franklin's signature can be found on front panel 3.^[3]

Franklin died on January 19, 1971, in Santa Monica, California.

Career

Dwight Franklin began working in 1906 as a taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History. In 1910, he participated in a museum-sponsored expedition to Mississippi's Moon Lake: part of the habitat of the American paddlefish.^[4] Franklin created many figurines and sculptures. He built historical dioramas for the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, The Newark Museum of Art, and the Museum of the City of New York.^[5]

In 1915, Franklin founded the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists with John Treadwell Nichols and Henry Weed Fowler.

In the early 1930s, Franklin moved from New York City to Los Angeles to begin work as a costume designer for Hollywood films.^[3]

Selected publications

• Franklin, Dwight (1910). A Method of Preparing Fish for Museum and Exhibition Purposes. [Washington, Govt. print. off. doi:10.5962/bhl.title.36232. S2CID 192961139.
• Franklin, Dwight (1913). "Color Changes in Collared Lizards". Copeia. 1 (1): 2–3. JSTOR 1436102.
• "Some Fish of the Middle West". Am. Mus. J. 14: 37. 1914.
• Franklin, Dwight (1914). "Note on a Nesting Sunfish". Copeia. 11 (11): 1. doi:10.2307/1435769. JSTOR 1435467.
• Franklin, Dwight (1914). "Notes on Leopard Lizards". Copeia. 5 (5): 1–2. doi:10.2307/1435769. JSTOR 1435769.
• Franklin, Dwight (1914). "Comparative Numbers of Lizards and Snakes on Desert". Copeia. 12 (12): 2. JSTOR 1436702.
• Franklin, Dwight (1915). "Notes on a Fish Caught Three Times". Copeia. 22 (22): 36. JSTOR 1437000.
• Franklin, Dwight (1915). "Notes on Amblystoma Tinigrum at Flagstaff, Arizona". Copeia. 21 (21): 30–31. doi:10.2307/1435786. JSTOR 1435786.
• "A Recent Development in Museum Groups". Proceedings of the American Association of Museums. 11: 110–112. 1916.

Complete filmography

References