Shedding New Botanical Light on Joseph Wright's "Portrait" of Brooke Boothby: Rousseauian Pleasure versus Medicinal Utility

Abstract

Joseph Wright's 18th-century work Portrait of Brooke Boothby (Tate Britain, London) hints at a deliberate irony related to the increasing polarity between the pleasure and utility of botanical study. Boothby was a young aristocrat, amateur botanist, poet, and the friend and confidant of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the portrait, his attire is unusually fashionable in the context of his countryside location, but it is also strange when one considers the painting's function as commemorating the publication of Rousseau's text Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques because Boothby, as a man in nature, is so much at odds with the idea of the Rousseauian man of nature. Moreover, the identification of several medicinal plants in the painting is at odds with both Rousseau's advocacy of botany for the idle and contemplative man of leisure and his praise of Linnaeus for having removed botany from the realms of pharmacology and medicine to the advantage of natural history. Wright's portrait is therefore subtly ironic because it highlights a tension between the Physiocratic and medicinal utility of botany and the leisured, pleasurable study of plants.