Sculptor and natural history artist.
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 sculpture 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.
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 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.
United States
In 1868, he travelled 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), and for 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.
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