Enfilade

George Stubbs, Portrait of the Kongouro (Kangaroo) from New
Holland, 1772 (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum)

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From Royal Museums Greenwich in connection with the exhibition The Art and Science of Exploration:

Exotic Anatomies: Stubbs, Banks, and the Cultures of Natural History
Royal Museums Greenwich, London, 9 March 2015

When Joseph Banks returned from Cook’s first voyage of exploration, he brought with him a new world. Not only did he bring collections of specimens that would occupy him and his assistant Daniel Solander for a lifetime, but he brought images and accounts of the South Pacific that changed forever how Europeans saw the world.

One of the oddest was the pelt of a kangaroo, a new animal encountered by the expedition in Australia, which would tax scientists and fascinate the public for decades. Banks commissioned George Stubbs to paint the animal’s portrait, reconstructed from the inflated or stuffed skin, drawings and descriptions. The painting then hung in his house in Soho Square, part of a domestic and scholarly space that soon became a virtual institution where the scientific community gathered.

Further afield, Banks’s specimens were dissected and analysed by the famous surgeon brothers William and John Hunter. They became anatomical objects in the same spaces where the Hunters taught and studied human anatomy, and where they displayed their collections, including others of Stubbs’s ‘exotic’ animal paintings. Stubbs’s kangaroo was rapidly engraved for the published public account of Cook’s voyage, while Cook and his successors brought back live kangaroos for royal menageries and popular entertainments.

Considering the interrelationship between Stubbs, Banks, Cook and the Hunter brothers, this symposium will place Stubbs’s kangaroo at the centre of a number of burgeoning cultures of natural history in 18th-century London. From the gentleman-scholar’s fashionable home, to the practical and controversial space of the anatomy theatre, to the hyperbolic public entertainment, the kangaroo brought a new ‘exoticism’ to natural history.

Fee: £10 | Concessions £7.50. Download the booking form.

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P R O G R A M M E

9.30  Registration and refreshments

10.00  Session 1: Stubbs In Soho Square with the Bankses
• Getting To Know You: Joseph Banks, Australia and the Kangaroo after Stubbs — Jordan Goodman (University College London)
• Science and Sociability: Sarah Sophia Banks and the Domestic Quarters at 32 Soho Square — Arlene Leis, (University of York)
Chair/comment: Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge)

11.30  Coffee and tea

12.00  Session 2: Stubbs in the Anatomy Theatre with the Hunter Brothers
• William Hunter, George Stubbs, and the Pursuit of Nature — Helen McCormack (The Glasgow School of Art)
• John Hunter (1728–93): Dr Jekyll or Dr Dolittle? — Wendy Moore (author and freelance journalist)
Chair/comment: Katy Barrett (Royal Museums Greenwich)

13.30  Lunch

14.30  Session 3: Stubbs in the London Exhibition Hall with the Public
• The Kangaroo as Scientific Curiosity and Public Spectacle in the Late 18th Century: From Sydney Cove to London — Markman Ellis (Queen Mary, University of London)
• Wonders From Down Under: Kangaroos in Popular Menageries — Helen Cowie (University of York)
Chair/comment: Christine Riding (Royal Museums Greenwich)

16.00  Round Up and Response Session
Richard Dunn (Royal Museums Greenwich)
Geoff Quilley (University of Sussex)

16.30  Curator-led tour of The Art and Science of Exploration

17.00  Wine reception