Banks and 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. Banks and Hunter inhabited the city at a time of tremendous advances in all the arts and sciences and their own personal interests contributed to the progress of public conceptions of the capital (Gwynn, 1766). While John Gascoigne has argued that as imperial science came to be utiliszed by the state, collections such as Hunter’s and Banks’s became anachronistic, no longer able to fulfill the purpose of enlightened instruction, this paper reassess these early scientific collections to explain how the personalised domestic interior remained critically important for the production of scientific knowledge (Opitz, 2016). William Hunter’s Anatomy School at 16 Great Windmill Street was a short stroll from Sir Joseph Banks’s mansion at Soho Square, and these homes of the first Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts and of the President of the Royal Society, respectively, acted as centres to the periphery, combining the accummulated knowledge of both institutions behind the domestic façade of their London houses. 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 an exemplary collection, encapsulating their ‘curious’ approach. Both individuals in their public and private roles favoured ‘an empirical habit of vision’ (Smith, 1985) encouraging the artists they employed to develop a method of recording that was as truthful to the original as possible. This empirical method appeared to be contrary to the ethos of the Royal Academy under its President, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who advocated a generalised form of abstracted nature. However, the Academy’s original aims are reflected in a poem from 1768, The Triumph of the Arts, which proclaims: ‘Where Art may join with Nature and with Sense’, fulfilling this aim with the appointment of Hunter as its First Professor of Anatomy. In the second half of the eighteenth-century, Hunter’s and Banks’s homes demonstrated an immediacy of experiences of englightenment science, where their specific conceptions of the world were on display. They were not yet anachronisms, instead they represent the collation of knowledge by these ‘living voyagers’ (Pennant, 1771), committed to the capacity of images and objects to instruct in a way not readily reducible to language or description. As the antiquarian Thomas Falconer remarked to Banks, the study of the natural world required ‘an enlarged view’ (Falconer, 1772) one that captured the expansive reach of the natural sciences, possible even within the setting of the domestic interior, the drawing room, library, herbarium and study, as this paper illustrates