Joseph Banks and William Hunter: where the Royal Society meets the Royal Academy

During the second half of the eighteenth century London emerged as the centre of a growing scientific community, motivated and stimulated by an expanding empire. Within this closely connected metropolitan network, the figures of Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and Dr William Hunter (1718-1783) exemplify the model of gentlemanly naturalist, each dynamically engaged in the pursuit of their interrelated interests in human and comparative anatomy, zoology and botany. Sir Joseph Banks’s mansion at Soho Squre was a short stroll from William Hunter’s Anatomy School at 16 Great Windmill Street and these homes of the President of the Royal Society and first Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts, respectively, acted as centres to the periphery, combining the accummulated knowledge of both institutions behind the domestic façade of their private homes. Elements of the gentlemanly ethos of the collector dominated both Banks’s and Hunter’s enlightenment view of science as part of a general polite culture, and this is particularly recognizable in their pursuit of exemplary collections. Both individuals in their public and private roles favoured an approach to the visual arts, described by Bernard Smith as ‘empirical naturalism’ (1992) and commissioned a number of artists to execute images that they undertsood would instruct in a way not readily reducible to language or description, combining the visual skills of the artist with the authentic expertise of the anatomist and naturalist. This paper describes these complementary approaches of Sir Joseph Banks and William Hunter, suggesting that while they each shared similar goals for the production and circulation of natural knowledge, these may have been motivated by quite different ideas on the purpose of their public roles, as President of the Royal Society and Professor of Anatomy.