A Forgotten Cosmic Designer

Natural History, Feb, 2000 by Jenny Lawrence, Richard Milner

Artist-scientist Howard Russell Butler painted moonscapes and portraits of "Earth's richest man" but his plans for a hall of astronomy were eclipsed.

At the age of sixty-two, painter Howard Russell Butler was invited to join a U.S. Naval Observatory expedition to Oregon to chronicle the solar eclipse of June 8, 1918. "As a portrait painter," he wrote in Natural History ("Painting Eclipses and Lunar Landscapes," July-August 1926), "I generally asked for ten sittings of two hours each. But all the time they would allow me on this occasion was 112 1/10 seconds." His finished painting eventually graced the Hayden Planetarium's rotunda.

To record color values, Butler relied on a shorthand system he had developed for use in "recording transient effects." The artist may have perfected his color shorthand while laboring over thirteen portraits of Andrew Carnegie, who reportedly could not sit still for long. Impressed with Butler's many talents (the painter had also been a professor of physics, a patent lawyer, and an arts administrator), the steel magnate hired him to design a mansion on Fifth Avenue, create an artificial lake at Princeton University, and run the recently built Carnegie Hall. Buder's gift for creating celestial images (and his friendship with Carnegie) attracted the attention of American Museum of Natural History president Henry Fairfield Osborn, who asked him to design a hall of astronomy. In May 1925, Osborn wrote to the Carnegie Foundation: "I am confident that [it] will be the most inspirational and seductive of all our great Sections and will not only be a unique monument to Mr. Andrew Carnegie but will exert a profound influence on the life and thought of the entire United States, as our Department of Paleontology is now doing." Carnegie money, however, was not forthcoming.

Butler had placed the hall at the Museum's center, as "the celestial hub, so to speak--from which all the halls containing terrestrial exhibits will radiate" ("An Ideal Astronomic Hall," Natural History, July-August, 1926). It was to be a dimly lit rotunda ringed with tiers of meteorite exhibits and backlighted telescopic photographs. Topping the four-storied hall would be a dome onto which the newly developed Zeiss projector could beam the images of 4,500 fixed stars and various heavenly bodies. By 1927, however, Butler's ambitious plan for a hall of astronomy was shelved in favor of a freestanding building that would eventually become the Hayden Planetarium.

Ultimately, Butler's legacy was not the hall design itself but a collection of artwork that was on display in the old Hayden for many years. His meticulous paintings of solar eclipses, of Mars as if viewed from its moons, and of Earth as it would appear to someone standing on our Moon stirred the imaginations of several generations of schoolchildren.

"Many times, while making [the [moonscape] painting, I longed to be at the spot and see how it really looked" Butler recalled. "But when [an astronomer] informed me that the temperature there would be about 70 [degrees] below zero, I was content to abandon that desire."