William Holbrook Beard - 1824-1900 - American artist

As one of the leading scientific illustrators of his day, Hawkins had worked with Charles Darwin (1809-1882) while preparing illustrations for the naturalist's first scientific book, The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, published between 1839 and 1843. While he did not accept Darwin's theories on evolution in their entirety, Hawkins's museum plans for both New York City and Washington, D.C., reflect the concepts, if not the details, of Darwin's discoveries.

Similarly, Beard's thinking and museum designs were heavily influenced by Darwin, although, like Hawkins, Beard refused to believe in man's descent from more primitive primates. Several of Beard's monkey pictures from the 1860's and 1870's refer specifically to Darwin and his theories of evolution. The Youthful Darwin Expounding his Theories, for example, painted shortly after the publication in 1859 of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, shows a young ape discussing a small collection of frogs and tadpoles with two older apes.(24) Viewers can only assume it is the young Darwin lecturing his elders about the complex concepts of evolution. In The Runaway Match of 1877, two young monkeys in formal dress stand before an older monkey, presumably a justice of the peace or parson, while a gaggle of other monkeys looks on. The parson, wearing a striped dressing gown, leans on an armchair in which lies a newspaper entitled The Darwinian, which shows an engraving of the bearded Darwin shaking hands with an ape. These and a number of similar oils by Beard are among the first to lampoon Darwin in America.

Regrettably, neither Beard's nor Hawkins's museum designs ever came to fruition. Beard's patron Henry Keep died in 1869, just as Beard was completing the first round of plans, and the independent nature of the project, a distinct advantage when Keep was alive, doomed the museum to oblivion once he was no longer available to champion and subsidize it.

Hawkins's New York and Washington museum projects were also stillborn. When he ran afoul of William (Boss) Tweed (1823-1878) and the Tammany Hall machine, which then ran New York City, Hawkins's Central Park studio and the sculptures it contained were attacked and destroyed by a mob of vandals (presumably at Tweed's behest).(25) His proposed Smithsonian design was scuttled by the lethal ax of budget cuts about the same time, thus inflicting on Hawkins a devastating double rejection within a year. Although he had made his reputation interpreting the inter-species struggles of the prehistoric world, he was not accustomed to the tooth and claw of contemporary politics.(26) His spirit broken by the destruction of his New York City studio, Hawkins left the city forever, moving first to Princeton, New Jersey, where he created some gloomy landscape oils for the university,(27) and then back to England, where he died in 1889.

Beard continued to exhibit his unconventional museum designs for several years, trying, without avail, to sell the concept to the newly organized boards of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.(28) But Calvert Vaux's more conservative designs, not Beard's, were eventually chosen for the two museums to be built on opposite sides of the park. In the decades that followed, the wild appearance of Manhattan Square, on which Beard had hoped to capitalize, was ultimately tamed.