Animating Anatomy: 16 Great Windmill Street Westminster

The origins of William Hunter’s town house at 16 Great Windmill Street, Westminster, began with a petition to the First Lord of the Treasury, the third Earl of Bute, requesting a piece of land on which to build a ‘great school’ of anatomy. Hunter believed a school dedicated to the science and patronised by the King, would reflect a work of ‘publick magnificence’ commensurate with the capital’s cultural and commercial ambitions. In this sense, Hunter’s project belongs amongst the fiercely contested sites of London’s elite environs during the second half of the eighteenth century; sites such as those delineated by John Gwynn in his London and Westminster Improved (1766). While Hunter’s proposed scheme was never realised, his house at Great Windmill Street surpassed its initial objective, as Robert Mylne’s design incorporated a school of anatomy alongside an extensive collection of natural history, books, coins, paintings, prints and drawings. The interiors were designed to reflect the pre-eminence of Hunter’s collections overall, with marble fireplaces, richly painted ceilings, and mahogany cabinets. As this paper explains, an interior dedicated to scientific research quickly emerged behind the domestic façade of Great Windmill Street, animating the worlds of anatomy, natural history, and the fine arts. William Hunter’s museum, like the Soho Square mansion of Sir Joseph Banks, acted as a centre to the periphery of a nascent scientific community with one distinctive feature however; as the home of the first Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts, it not only served to provide instruction to physicians and surgeons but to artists also. As one contemporary remarked: ‘Dr. Hunter’s fine injection [anatomical preparation] is like a painters’, (Cruickshank, 1779) demonstrating how Hunter and his London home foregrounded anatomy within the cultural sphere of fine art practice