Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins
Encyclopedia
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (8 February 1807– 27 January 1894) was an English
sculptor
and natural history
artist
renowned for combining both in his work on the life-size models of dinosaurs in the Crystal Palace Park
, Sydenham
, south London
. He was also a noted lecturer on zoology
and related topics.
from William Behnes
. At the age of 20, he began to study natural history and later geology. He contributed illustrations to The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle. During the 1840s, he produced studies of living animals in Knowsley
Park, near Liverpool
for Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. The park was one of the largest private menageries in Victorian England and Hawkins' work was later published with John Edward Gray
's text as "Gleanings from the Menagerie at Knowsley" . Over the same period Hawkins exhibited four sculptures at the Royal Academy
between 1847 and 1849, and was elected a member of the Society of Arts in 1846 and a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1847. Fellowship of the Geological Society of London
followed in 1854.
and other leading scientific figures of the time – Owen estimated the size and overall shape of the animals, leaving Hawkins to sculpt models according to Owen's directions. Although it is often claimed that a dinner was held inside the Iguanodon
, in fact the dinner was held inside the mold that was used to make the large sculpture. Nonetheless, the dinner party, hosted by Owen on 31 December 1853, garnered attention in the press. Some of the sculptures are still on display at Sydenham Crystal Palace Park.
In 1868, he traveled to America
to deliver a series of lectures. Working with the scientist Joseph Leidy
, Hawkins designed and cast an almost complete skeleton
of Hadrosaurus
foulkii which was then displayed at the Academy of Natural Sciences
in Philadelphia. Supported on an iron framework in a life-like pose, this was the world's first mounted dinosaur skeleton.
Hawkins was later commissioned to produce models for New York City
's Central Park
museum similar to these he had created in Sydenham. He established a studio on the modern site of the American Museum of Natural History
in Manhattan
, and planned to create a Paleozoic Museum
. However, the corrupt local politics of William M. "Boss" Tweed intervened, the project was shelved in 1870, and the models that Hawkins had created were said to have been buried in the south part, probably not far from Umpire Rock and the Heckscher ballfields, in Central Park. Hawkins then turned to dinosaur skeleton reconstruction work at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He returned to England in 1874, but almost immediately returned, doing dinosaur reconstructions at Princeton University (then called the College of New Jersey) in Princeton, New Jersey, (where he also created paintings of dinosaurs). These paintings remain in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum. Hawkins also worked at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. He again returned to Britain in 1878.
Over 100 years later in 2002, Barbara Kerley's book The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, illustrated by Brian Selznick
, won a Caldecott Honor citation.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
sculptor
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
and natural history
Natural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
renowned for combining both in his work on the life-size models of dinosaurs in the Crystal Palace Park
Crystal Palace Dinosaurs
The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, also known as Dinosaur Court, are a series of sculptures of dinosaurs and extinct mammals located in Crystal Palace, London. Commissioned in 1852 and unveiled in 1854, they were the first dinosaur sculptures in the world, pre-dating the publication of Charles Darwin's...
, Sydenham
Sydenham
Sydenham is an area and electoral ward in the London Borough of Lewisham; although some streets towards Crystal Palace Park, Forest Hill and Penge are outside the ward and in the London Borough of Bromley, and some streets off Sydenham Hill are in the London Borough of Southwark. Sydenham was in...
, south London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. He was also a noted lecturer on zoology
Zoology
Zoology |zoölogy]]), is the branch of biology that relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct...
and related topics.
Education and early career
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was born in Bloomsbury, London on 8 February 1807, the son of Thomas Hawkins, an artist, and Louisa Anne Waterhouse, the daughter of a Jamaica plantation family of apparent Catholic sympathies. He studied at St. Aloysius College, and learned sculptureSculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
from William Behnes
William Behnes
William Behnes was an English sculptor of the early 19th century.Born in London, Behnes was the son of a Hanoverian pianoforte-maker and his English wife. His early life was spent in Dublin where he studied art at the Dublin Academy....
. At the age of 20, he began to study natural history and later geology. He contributed illustrations to The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle. During the 1840s, he produced studies of living animals in Knowsley
Knowsley Hall
Knowsley Hall is a stately home near Liverpool within the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley, in Merseyside, England. It has been designated by English Heritage as a Grade II* listed building, and is the ancestral home of the Stanley family, the Earls of Derby. The hall is surrounded by of...
Park, near Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
for Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. The park was one of the largest private menageries in Victorian England and Hawkins' work was later published with John Edward Gray
John Edward Gray
John Edward Gray, FRS was a British zoologist. He was the elder brother of George Robert Gray and son of the pharmacologist and botanist Samuel Frederick Gray ....
's text as "Gleanings from the Menagerie at Knowsley" . Over the same period Hawkins exhibited four sculptures at the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
between 1847 and 1849, and was elected a member of the Society of Arts in 1846 and a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1847. Fellowship of the Geological Society of London
Geological Society of London
The Geological Society of London is a learned society based in the United Kingdom with the aim of "investigating the mineral structure of the Earth"...
followed in 1854.
Great Exhibition
Meanwhile, possibly due to Derby's connections, Hawkins was appointed assistant superintendent of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. The following year (1852), he was appointed by the Crystal Palace company to create 33 life-size concrete models of extinct dinosaurs to be placed in the south London park to which the great glass exhibition hall was to be relocated. In this work, which took some three years, he collaborated with Sir Richard OwenRichard Owen
Sir Richard Owen, FRS KCB was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and palaeontologist.Owen is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria and for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...
and other leading scientific figures of the time – Owen estimated the size and overall shape of the animals, leaving Hawkins to sculpt models according to Owen's directions. Although it is often claimed that a dinner was held inside the Iguanodon
Iguanodon
Iguanodon is a genus of ornithopod dinosaur that lived roughly halfway between the first of the swift bipedal hypsilophodontids and the ornithopods' culmination in the duck-billed dinosaurs...
, in fact the dinner was held inside the mold that was used to make the large sculpture. Nonetheless, the dinner party, hosted by Owen on 31 December 1853, garnered attention in the press. Some of the sculptures are still on display at Sydenham Crystal Palace Park.
United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
to deliver a series of lectures. Working with the scientist Joseph Leidy
Joseph Leidy
Joseph Leidy was an American paleontologist.Leidy was professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, and later was a professor of natural history at Swarthmore College. His book Extinct Fauna of Dakota and Nebraska contained many species not previously described and many previously...
, Hawkins designed and cast an almost complete skeleton
Skeleton
The skeleton is the body part that forms the supporting structure of an organism. There are two different skeletal types: the exoskeleton, which is the stable outer shell of an organism, and the endoskeleton, which forms the support structure inside the body.In a figurative sense, skeleton can...
of Hadrosaurus
Hadrosaurus
Hadrosaurus is a valid genus of hadrosaurid dinosaur. In 1858, a skeleton of a dinosaur from this genus was the first dinosaur skeleton known from more than isolated teeth to be found in North America. In 1868, it became the first ever mounted dinosaur skeleton...
foulkii which was then displayed at the Academy of Natural Sciences
Academy of Natural Sciences
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, formerly Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, is the oldest natural science research institution and museum in the New World...
in Philadelphia. Supported on an iron framework in a life-like pose, this was the world's first mounted dinosaur skeleton.
Hawkins was later commissioned to produce models for New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
's Central Park
Central Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
museum similar to these he had created in Sydenham. He established a studio on the modern site of the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, and planned to create a Paleozoic Museum
Paleozoic Museum
Following the success of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' life-sized concrete dinosaur models created for England's Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851, in 1868 the Commissioners of Manhattan's newly created Central Park recruited the sculptor to create replicas of America's antediluvian...
. However, the corrupt local politics of William M. "Boss" Tweed intervened, the project was shelved in 1870, and the models that Hawkins had created were said to have been buried in the south part, probably not far from Umpire Rock and the Heckscher ballfields, in Central Park. Hawkins then turned to dinosaur skeleton reconstruction work at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He returned to England in 1874, but almost immediately returned, doing dinosaur reconstructions at Princeton University (then called the College of New Jersey) in Princeton, New Jersey, (where he also created paintings of dinosaurs). These paintings remain in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum. Hawkins also worked at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. He again returned to Britain in 1878.
Family and Death
Hawkins had married in 1826 to Mary Selina Green, and by her had six children, one of whom died in infancy. In 1835, he met and fell in love with artist Frances 'Louisa' Keenan, and the next year he left his family and bigamously married her. He kept in touch with Mary and her children, but lived with Louisa, having two additional daughters. On his 1874 return to England, he seems to have become estranged from Louisa. He was living with his son by Mary, amidst what he described a "climax of domestic troubles" thought to indicate that Louisa had finally learned that their 38-year marriage had been invalid, and this may have led to his precipitous return to America in 1875. After his second return, he moved to West Brompton to be near his first wife, Mary, who was ill. Mary died in 1880. In 1883, Hawkins again married Louisa, although since they were not cohabitants at the time this was probably done for legalistic reasons (to legitimize their children), and they apparently never reconciled prior to her death the next year. Hawkins suffered a debilitating stroke in 1889, leading to erroneous reports of his death, and finally died on 27 January 1894.Over 100 years later in 2002, Barbara Kerley's book The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, illustrated by Brian Selznick
Brian Selznick
Brian Selznick is a Caldecott-winning American author and illustrator of children's books.-Life and career:Selznick was born in East Brunswick Township, New Jersey...
, won a Caldecott Honor citation.
Further reading
- Bramwell, Valerie and Peck, Robert M., All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.
- Kerley, Barbara. The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins: An Illuminating History of Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins, Artist and Lecturer Illustrated by Brian Selznick. The design of this juvenile biography is based on Hawkins' own album, currently held in the Ewell Sale Stewart Library at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.
- Goldman, David. "Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and his New York City Paleozoic Museum." Prehistoric Times Magazine Dec/Jan 2003.
- Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists, University of Chicago Press. Entry on Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Carla Yanni
External links
- Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins Album Images Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.
- Crystal Palace Park
- Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and his New York City Paleozoic Museum
- "A Buried History of Paleontology," Brian Selznick and David Serlin From Cabinet Magazine Online Issue 28, Winter 2007/08.
- "Divine Intervention, Dinosaurs, and Darwin's Descent" Brian Switek, Laelaps, June 28, 2011