THE SCULPTURES OF WATERHOUSE HAWKINS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA AND THE ILL-FATED PALEOZOIC MUSEUM OF CENTRAL PARK: THE BEGINNINGS OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL REPRESENTATION OF EXTINCT ANIMALS

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1889) was a British scientific illustrator and sculptor. In the early 1850s, anatomist Richard Owen recruited Hawkins to create life-size concrete sculptures of iguanodons, ichthyosaurs, and other extinct animals for an exhibition in Sydenham, near London. Hawkins described his sculptures as “the first efforts of the kind ever attempted.”

Hawkins’ sculptures went on public display in 1854, stimulating much interest and excitement about animals of “former worlds.” The public’s fascination with extinct animals was heightened by the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859. In 1860 Hawkins drew a scene titled “Struggles for Life among British Animals of Primaeval Times.” The drawing was reproduced as a wall-chart-size, colored lithograph, 34 inches wide by 28 inches high, and sold for 12 shillings. This was the largest wall-chart-size scene from deep time published to date. It was followed by a set of six additional “Struggles for Life” wall charts.

Hawkins’ fame as a sculptor and illustrator of former worlds led to a lecture tour in America in 1868. At that time, Central Park was a bold, new, still-evolving feature of New York City, and the Central Park commissioners proposed to Hawkins that he “undertake the resuscitation of a group of animals of the former periods of the American continent.” The commissioners developed a grandiose plan to display Hawkins’ Central Park sculptures in a Crystal Palace-like, glass building located on the edge of the park, facing Eighth Avenue, opposite Sixty-third Street. The building was to be called the Paleozoic Museum.

Hawkins worked on the project for two years in a workshop built for him in Central Park. However, funding for the project dried up when New York politician William “Boss” Tweed, who controlled the Tammany Hall political machine, arranged for the Central Park Commission to be abolished and replaced with a Public Parks Board that was stacked with his political appointees. Even without funding, Hawkins and his assistants continued work on the project. Tragically, one night Tweed’s goons broke into Hawkins’ workshop and used sledgehammers to smash the sculptures and molds that had been completed. Not only did they destroy two years of Hawkins’ work, they killed the prospects for a grand museum of sculptures from deep time in Central Park.