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. 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. (This event is reported in the 1994 novel End of an Era by Robert J. Sawyer: "Paleontology has a long history of famous meals. On New Year's Eve, 1853, Sir Richard Owen hosted a dinner for twenty fossil experts inside a life-size reconstruction of Iguanodon made under his direction by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.") Some of the sculptures are still on display at Sydenham Crystal Palace Park.
Read more about this topic: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins
Famous quotes containing the word exhibition:
“Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children’s play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in “playing” chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.”
—Northrop Frye (1912–1991)
“The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or has visited a menagerie or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. “A boy,” says Plato, “is the most vicious of all beasts;” and in the same spirit the old English poet Gascoigne says, “A boy is better unborn than untaught.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)