Illustrations from the Wellcome Institute Library. Earl's Court House from John Hunter to Robert Gardiner Hill

The mansion and gardens which John Hunter constructed as a country residence and biological research station at Earl's Court in London became in due course a private lunatic asylum for ladies, although the building's connexion with Hunter was not one which the later proprietors liked to publicize.A detailed history of the house has never been written, and it may be that the documents for such a history do not survive.The purpose ofthis note is to introduce two pictures in the Wellcome Institute library which portray the house and gardens, the first as they were in Hunter's time and the second after the property had been turned into an asylum.Like other documents describing the house, the pictures are not neutral depictions but illustrate the partiality of those who commissioned or made them.JOHN HUNTER'S HOUSE John Hunter first lived in Earl's Court in 1760, but it was not until 1765 that he constructed his own residence, the gardens of which occupied the site of the present Barkston Gardens, on the east side of Earl's Court Road.Between 1768 and Hunter's death in 1793, and again in several stages between 1793 and 1863, the house was probably re-faced and certainly enlarged.'The earliest picture of it seems to be a watercolour dated 1821 in Jesse Foot's own extra-illustrated copy ofhis The life ofJohn Hunter, which was originally published in 1794.In this copy, now in the Wellcome Institute library, the original 287 small pages oftext are sumptuously bound up in three massive volumes in the company of numerous watercolours, engravings, and miscellanea bearing on various points in Jesse Foot's narrative, each volume being announced by a title-page dated 1822, four years before Foot's death.2The watercolour of "Earle's Court" which appears on p. 524 of the extra-illustrated version (pl. 1) bears the initials ofthe otherwise unidentified artist "WPS" and the date 1821.It must surely have been made at Foot's request specifically to illustrate his text, for its portrayal of the house concentrates on features mentioned by Foot but not all *W.