Silver King, a polar bear, being taken by ship away from his homeland. Colour lithograph.

Paul J. Rainey (1877-1923) was a millionaire who devoted himself to field sports and big game hunting and to the development of his vast estates in North Mississippi and in Kenya. He was also one of the pioneers of big game cinematography: his best known film African Hunt, produced in 1912, attracted large crowds at the American Museum of Natural History and ran for thirteen months at a commercial theater on Broadway. This lithographic poster in the Wellcome Library advertises another film by him, about which almost no information seems to be available. Rainey's gifts to the Bronx Zoo are recognized in the Paul J. Rainey Memorial Gateway which was constructed at the Zoo in 1934 (information from the web pages of the Paul Rainey band, http://prb.datalane.net/prbamaz.htm, 5 December 2000)