Everything about Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins totally explained
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
Crystal Palace Park,
Sydenham, south
London. He was also a noted lecturer on
zoology and related topics.
Born in London, Hawkins studied at St. Aloysius college, and learned
sculpture from
William Behnes. At the age of 20, he began to study natural history and later geology. During the 1840s, he produced studies of living animals in
Knowsley Park, near
Liverpool for
Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, 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.
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 Owen 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 (one,
Iguanodon, was so large that a 20-strong dinner party was held inside on
31 December 1853). Some of the sculptures are still on display at Sydenham
Crystal Palace Park
, pictures of which are available online at the Sydenham Town website.
In
1868, he travelled to
America to deliver a series of lectures. He also helped cast an almost complete
hadrosaurus skeleton 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'd 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, corrupt local politics 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, at Princeton University [thencalled the College of New Jersey] in Princeton, New Jersey (where he also created paintings of dinosaurs), and for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia before returning to Britain in 1878, where after suffering a stroke in 1889, leading to erroneous reports of his death, he finally passed away in January of 1894.
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