McCormack, Helen (2010) A collector of the fine arts in eighteenth- century Britain: Dr William Hunter (1718-1783). PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1890/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] A Collector of the Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Dr William Hunter (1718-1783) Helen McCormack Submitted for Examination for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) The University of Glasgow Department of History of Art Faculty of Arts August 2009 © Helen McCormack August 28th 2009 A Collector of the Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Dr William Hunter 1718-1783 Contents Acknowledgements Abstract 1 Introduction: Art and Science, Curiosity and Commerce 2 Chapter One: Context and Chronology: Forming the museum 21 Chapter Two: The Great Windmill Street Anatomy Theatre and Museum 51 Chapter Three: Patronage and Patriots: Hunter and the British School of Artists 78 Chapter Four: Collecting Ambitions: The Grand Tour Paintings 100 Chapter Five: Art, Medicine, Nature 138 Conclusion 172 List of Illustrations 183 Bibliography 187 Acknowledgements I would like to express my deep gratitude to the following colleagues who gave me much support and encouragement in writing and researching this Doctoral thesis. Professor Alison Yarrington and Dr John Bonehill, in the History of Art Department, my supervisors, made critical and intellectual demands while managing to be equally inspiring and considerate. In the Hunterian Art Gallery, Peter Black, Anne Dulau, and Mungo Campbell shared their valuable knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the Hunterian collection with me and I am most grateful to them. In the Hunterian Museum I was also given kind assistance from John Faithfull, Geoff Hancock, Donal Bateson and Maggie Reilly. David Weston, in the special collections department of the University Library also provided much assistance and I am grateful to him and the staff in the department. The David Carritt Scholarship in the History of Art Department provided me with the financial help in order to complete my studies and I am sincerely grateful to Professor Alison Yarrington for this. Other financial assistance was provided by research support grants from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Wellcome Trust, in London. A Collector of the Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Dr William Hunter (1718-1783) Abstract Fine art, in the form of oil paintings, prints and drawings, accounts for a considerable proportion of the collection formed by the Scottish anatomist, Dr William Hunter. This thesis examines the contexts for the various works of art that were either bought or commissioned by him or were the result of donations and gifts. It covers the period from the 1740s, when Hunter arrived in London until his death in 1783 and follows his collecting activities from their origins in the specialist, anatomical-antiquarian interests of his predecessors in the 1750s to the more elaborate works that were increasingly available to him through his contacts with artists and dealers by the 1770s. This involves placing Hunter within a chronology of collecting during the eighteenth century, a period characterised by an expansion of cultural activity within all the arts. Such a commodification of culture brought with it various implications for the production and reception of the arts that had been predominantly the reserve of the aristocracy. William Hunter was a professional, a new type of Gentleman Connoisseur, whose motivations to collect were inspired by an innate empirical curiosity that dominated the era. Therefore, curiosity as a type of investigative phenomenon is considered in the thesis as the driving force behind the accumulation and calculation of collectible objects. Hunter’s incorporation of a fine art collection within a museum dominated by anatomy and natural history calls for a re-consideration of the place of art derived from the close study of nature during the period. His influence as a teacher and patron of the arts is also reconsidered here by a closer examination of the part he played in the community of artists that emerged in London during the 1760s. The thesis employs a methodology that combines the techniques of micro-history, a close, cultural-anthropological analysis viewed through a framework of more general, theoretical themes, classicism, antiquarianism and consumerism that seek to impose an understanding on the sheer diversity and range of interrelated ideas that constituted the practice of collecting during the eighteenth century. It reveals that, rather than standing on the periphery, William Hunter played a crucial, if not central, role in the promotion and dissemination of the fine arts in Britain. 1 A Collector of the Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Dr William Hunter 1718-1783 Introduction Art and science, curiosity and commerce A correspondent of the St James’s Chronicle, May 25, 1779, included in his letter to the editor an extract from the poem Ode to Curiosity, by the Rev. William Tasker (1740- 1800), inspired by Dr William Hunter’s Museum at 16 Great Windmill Street, London. The author lamented that, despite ‘being much visited and extolled by Foreigners, I am the more surprised that it hath not been more taken Notice of by English Writers’. He went on to observe that the Ode, ‘with not small Propriety, makes Dr. Hunter’s Museum the constant Reference of that fanciful Goddess … Curiosity’: 1 ANCIENT or modern, all we know, To thy bright Origin we owe; The Healing Art is thine; With the Coan Sage was fraught, From thee deriv’d that heavenly Thought, Which stamp’d his Work Divine. “GALEN’S great Mind, thou led’st to view Man’s wondrous Fabric, whence he knew The Harmony of Parts; In his dark Age, Anatomy Languish’d in feeble Infancy, ‘Mong rude unfinish’d Arts. “Succeeding Sages caught the Flame, More nicely icann’d the human Frame, To trace the arterial Way. To trace the Veins from every Part, Meandering to the Fountain heart, Reserv’d for HARVEY’S DAY. “To HUNTER thou hast lastly shown (All that perchance shall e’er be known) Of th’ human Form Divine: Thou didst direct his searching Eye, The smallest Lymphaeduct to spy, 1 1 Letter to the Saint James’s Chronicle, or the British Evening Post, Tuesday, May 25, 1779. 2 And Nerve minutely fine. “Rais’d by the Wonder-working Hand, Behold thy own bright Temple stand Off spring of HUNTER’S Mind. ‘Mid Learning’s old and modern Lore, And Nature’s choice collected Store, There, Goddess, dwell ensrhin’d! CURIOSUS2 The poem describes how the foremost practitioners in the art and science of anatomy had been motivated by curiosity. William Hunter is singled out as the modern-day equivalent of Hippocrates, The Coan Sage, named after the island of Cos, where he was reputed to have been born, Galen, and Harvey, and his museum, his ‘own bright Temple’, the repository of that inheritance, where the products of Nature, gathered under curiosity, are preserved. Tasker’s poem is rich in anatomical vocabulary, with vivid phrases such as ‘Man’s wondrous fabric’, the ‘harmony of parts’, ‘the smallest lymph duct’, and ‘Nerve minutely fine’, conjuring an imagery rendolent of Hunter’s anatomy displays. He was a friend of Hunter, attending his anatomy lectures and presumably given free access to the museum while researching a highly illustrated book he had planned on the History of Physiology from Aristotle to Lavater.3 Anatomy, as Tasker’s Ode confirms, was considered in this period both an ‘art’ and a ‘science’. This lack of a clear distinction between areas of expertise and knowledge is of course symptomatic of a more general integration of what were to become during the course of the nineteenth century ever more specialized forms of enquiry. In common with many virtuoso figures of the day, Hunter’s active pursuit of anatomical research informed and stimulated his interests, his ‘curiosity’, in other aspects of the natural sciences as well as objects of use and beauty. His museum in Great Windmill Street brought natural and artificial curiosities into conjunction, encompassing minerals, shells, plant and animal life, corals, insects and birds, representative of Enlightenment ideas of the planet as a body, the earth as a living animal, where natural forms connected all living matter, as well as items of ingenious manufacture, of ancient and modern workmanship, drawn from Britain, the Continent and more far off, exotic locales, and including pottery, medals 2 Tasker, Rev. W. ‘Ode to Curiosity’, stanzas III-VII, Poems by the Rev. W. Tasker, AB, An Ode to the Warlike Genius of Britain, the Third edition with additions, an Ode to Curiosity, London, 1779, pp. 30-32. 3 Rivers, David, Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain, arranged according to an alphabetical catalogue … and including a list of their works … London 1798, pp. 294-295. In fact, Tasker’s Letter seems to include much of the material that was to make up this publication. 3 and fine art.4 There was a natural association between the study of antiquities and natural history, the collecting and appreciation of the fine arts and natural philosophy, not only apparent in the vast and varied objects Hunter amassed but in his affiliation with various institutional bodies that included the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Academy of Arts.