{"id":56416,"date":"2017-12-05T23:39:16","date_gmt":"2017-12-06T04:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/181265\/painting-the-land-before-time-a-victorian-vision-of-dinosaur-life\/"},"modified":"2024-08-26T16:17:04","modified_gmt":"2024-08-26T20:17:04","slug":"painting-the-land-before-time-a-victorian-vision-of-dinosaur-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/2017\/painting-the-land-before-time-a-victorian-vision-of-dinosaur-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Painting the Land Before Time: A Victorian Vision of Dinosaur Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Detail
Detail of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins\u2019s \u201cJurassic Life of Europe\u201d (1877), oil canvas (all images courtesy Princeton University Art Museum)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From 1805 to as recently as 2000, Princeton University exhibited\u00a0<\/strong>one of the great college natural history collections<\/a>, rivaling those of peers Harvard and Yale.\u00a0<\/strong>As institutions fought to claim the latest and greatest dinosaur fossils in the\u00a0Bone Wars<\/a> of the late 19th century, Princeton undergraduate expeditions periodically ventured out to the American West in search of plant and mineralogical specimens to populate the university\u2019s museum<\/a>, making nine excavation trips in total and amassing tens of thousands of samples for its Vertebrate Paleontology collection. First housed in the Faculty Room in Nassau Hall and later in the newly constructed Guyot Hall, Princeton\u2019s Natural History Museum tragically closed its doors in 2000 and was converted into offices and classrooms. However, unlike the collection of Brown University\u2019s former Jenks Museum of Natural History and Anthropology \u2014\u00a0the majority of which was driven into a dump<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0most of the specimens in Princeton\u2019s former natural history museum have been retained and stored by the university.<\/p>\n

\"Benjamin
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, \u2018Early Jurassic Marine Reptiles\u2019 (1876)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In addition to scientific specimens, the Princeton Natural History Museum collected artwork to contextualize its holdings and illustrate the flora and fauna of the ancient world.\u00a0Displayed high above the viewer and wrapping around the central atrium of the museum, hung seventeen murals by Victorian artist and naturalist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.\u00a0Commissioned in 1876 by university president James McCosh<\/a>, the paintings presented\u00a0prehistoric life from various global regions and geological eras, providing museumgoers with a narrated timeline of the progression of life from the dawn of time.<\/p>\n

Of Hawkins\u2019s 17 commissioned paintings, 15 survive and remain at Princeton University and four feature his beloved dinosaurs. According to the Princeton Art Museum\u2019s website<\/a>,\u00a0the works\u00a0\u201cconstitute the earliest known representations of dinosaurs and prehistoric life as they were understood at the time.\u201d Hawkins used\u00a0fossil findings and scientific evidence to literally flesh out his representations of animals, with the intention of educating the public about past life. Earlier in his career, in 1852, he sculpted a menagerie of dinosaurs<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 the first life-size reconstructions of their type \u2014 for the grounds of the Crystal Palace in London. In celebration of the feat, Hawkins and 21 other scientists famously dined on a seven-course meal in the belly of \u201can Iguanodon<\/a>\u201d as they rang in the new year of 1854. Sir Richard Owen, the paleontologist who coined the term \u201cDinosauria<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0sat at the head of the table.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The famous banquet in the mould of the Crystal Palace Iguanodon, New Year\u2019s Eve, 1853. As depicted in the \u2018Illustrated London News\u2019 and scanned from \u2018The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Dinosaurs\u2019 (image courtesy Wikipedia)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Through his aesthetic decisions, Hawkins ascribed behaviors to dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals that neither he nor the scientists of his time had the capacity or data to deduce. The works demonstrate how, as prehistoric life was first unearthed, Hawkins pieced together fact and fantasy to produce representations of dinosaurs that we still recognize today. They set the paradigm for the successive portrayal of dinosaurs by later paleoartists like Charles Knight<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite beginning his career as an illustrator for Charles Darwin, Hawkins openly mocked Darwin\u2019s views<\/a> on evolution and natural selection. In the introduction to his book A Comparative View of the Human and Animal Frame<\/i><\/a>, published in 1860, Hawkins points to the \u201coneness of plan upon all animals are constructed,\u201d and credits the \u201comniscient wisdom\u201d of the \u201cAlmighty Architect.\u201d The medium of painting enabled Hawkins to advance his creationist and anti-Darwinian views. In the \u201cCretaceous Life of New Jersey,\u201d Hawkins crowds the landscape with different species \u2014 at least four different ones<\/a>, including the Dryptosaurus, Hadrosaurus, Mosasaurus, and Elasmosaurus\u00a0<\/strong><\/i>\u2014 theatrically organizing them within the universe of the rectangular painting. Influenced by the\u00a0staunch anti-evolution beliefs of Sir Owen, his scientific advisor, Hawkins modeled the physiology of dinosaurs on that of mammals, positioning them on all four legs to emphasize\u00a0that the creatures,\u00a0akin to today\u2019s mammals, were \u201cthe highest form of life on earth at the time \u2026\u00a0suited to their time and place<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0Hawkins\u2019s 1853 Crystal Palace \u201cIguanodon<\/a>\u201d is particularly rotund\u00a0and\u00a0mammal-like with its soft belly and short limbs, demonstrating Owen\u2019s ideological pull on Hawkins\u2019s artistry.<\/p>\n

\"PUAM\"
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, \u201cCretaceous Life of New Jersey\u201d (1877)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By demonstrating the interaction between species and their contemporary environments, Hawkins\u2019s\u00a0paintings served to educate university students about geological and biological history and animate ancient fossil specimens. The visceral nature of the works, says Robert McCracken Peck,<\/a>\u00a0Curator of Art and Artifacts and Senior Fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, \u201cgave them enormous power to convince [contemporaries] of the reality of deep time,\u201d and preceded the proliferation of dinosaur imagery in today\u2019s pop culture.<\/p>\n

\"PP340\"
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, \u201cJurassic Life of Europe\u201d (1877)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"OLYMPUS
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, \u201cTriassic Life of Germany\u201d (1877)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cCretaceous Life of New Jersey<\/a>\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>is on view at the Princeton University Art Museum<\/a>.The remaining Hawkins paintings are in storage, but can be viewed by\u00a0special request.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source: Painting the Land Before Time: A Victorian Vision of Dinosaur Life<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Detail of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins\u2019s \u201cJurassic Life of Europe\u201d (1877), oil canvas (all images courtesy Princeton University Art Museum) From 1805 to as recently as 2000, Princeton University exhibited\u00a0one of the great college natural history collections, rivaling those of peers Harvard and Yale.\u00a0As institutions fought to claim the latest and greatest dinosaur fossils in the\u00a0Bone […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56417,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[880],"tags":[230,559,728],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56416"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76561,"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56416\/revisions\/76561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thatgrrl.com\/site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}