Superb Cabinets or Splendid Anachronisms? Anatomy, Natural History and Fine Arts in the London Town House

Abstract

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 facade 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.. As this chapter explains, Hunter’s house, of which only the facade remains today, initiated a model building type in London during the second half of the eighteenth century, when the capital became a focal point for the material and visual projections of Britain’s imperial ambitions. While prospective plans for garden squares, symmetrically aligned terraces and monumental vistas aimed to please the geographical and topographical aesthetics of the city, the domestic interiors of London’s town houses encased the physical expressions of enlightenment commerce and trade, travel, exploration, art and architecture. In this chapter, Hunter’s house is compared with that of William’s younger brother, the surgeon John Hunter (1728-1793) and the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820). These homes contained the collections of gentleman naturalists, acquired over their lifetimes, and are representative of a form of early science dominated by a single-minded motivation. They acted as centres to the periphery of scientific experiment and exploration, and the contents of their drawing rooms, libraries, herbariums and galleries were directly and physically connected to the wider realms of street and city, nation and empire. The lasting significance of all three of these men’s homes lies in the formation of collections as products of knowledge, interconnected with the pedagogical aims of two of the most prominent public institutions with which they were aligned: the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Arts.