The Romantic Prospects of the Duke of Richmond's Moose

Abstract

George Stubbs's painting The Duke of Richmond's First Bull Moose (1770) offers a visual counterpart to an arresting account addressed to the naturalist Thomas Pennant in Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne of his 1768 visit to inspect the Duke of Richmond's recently deceased female “moose-deer.” The Duke was one of several aristocrats who acquired moose from Canada; his animals were studied by White, by Pennant, and by the physician and anatomist William Hunter who commissioned Stubbs's work. While Stubbs depicted the animal accurately, he had no knowledge of its natural habitat; the moose is incongruously placed in a mountainous lake landscape during an approaching storm. This romanticized landscape prospect offers a metaphor for the story of the moose in late eighteenth-century Britain. While looking forward and outward to understand the natural world, these depictions of the moose are equally subjective and imaginative and contributed to debates on extinction and the idea of species. The unsuccessful introduction of the moose to Britain defeated prospects for their domestication and cross-breeding. Close reading of Stubbs's painting, White's narrative, Pennant's Arctic Zoology, and Hunter's unpublished scientific paper on the moose suggest the kinds of wonder which mark the efforts on the part of science and the arts to understand this puzzling and mysterious animal.