‘George Stubbs, William Hunter and the Pursuit of Nature’

William Hunter and George Stubbs shared a remarkably similar ambition for the ways in which the fine arts might be put to use in the production of knowledge of natural history in the second half of the eighteenth century. Each understood how the activities of naturalists encompassed Enlightenment values by considering the study of the natural world in ‘an enlarged view’ . In this sense, and for Stubbs and Hunter in particular, this meant incorporating anatomy within the broader realm of the natural sciences that typically featured subject matters such as geology and zoology, alongside astronomy and knowledge of climates. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the close observational approach to the natural world of both Hunter and Stubbs became explicitly connected in the production of paintings such as The Nilgai (1769) and The Moose (1770) and consequently their work featured among the debates surrounding the imitation and representation of nature within the cosmopolitan world of the Royal Academy of Arts and polite culture in London. Indeed, Stubbs’s paintings for Hunter parallel those executed for the gentleman naturalist and explorer, Sir Joseph Banks, (1743-1820) who commissioned the artist to paint the The Kongouro from New Holland (The Kangaroo) (1772) and Portrait of a Large Dog (Dingo) (1772), specimens that were brought back to London from Captain James Cook’s first voyage, from 1768-1771. Such ‘exotic’ animals were the subject of fascination and speculation among fashionable audiences, but for Stubbs and Hunter the interest in these creatures lay in their inherently curious physiognomy and anatomy, as the physician and artist both investigated ideas of the origins and extinction of species, by developing the practice of autopsia (to see with one’s own eyes), a particular ‘empirical habit of vision’ that played an influential role in the new visual discourse of the period. Therefore this paper brings together the work of George Stubbs and William Hunter in order to demonstrate that their collaborations reflect the interconnectedness of the fine arts and natural history during the later eighteenth century, and that the ambitious qualities of such works spanned the relatively local worlds of the anatomical lecture theatre to the very limits of global exploration and empire