Pennant, Hunter, Stubbs and the Pursuit of Nature
- Submitting institution
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Glasgow School of Art
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 4409
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
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- Book title
- Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant's Tours of Scotland and Wales
- Publisher
- Anthem Press
- ISBN
- 9781783086535
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This essay is published in an anthology of writings centred on the Welsh eighteenth-century traveller and naturalist, Thomas Pennant (1726-1798). Published by Anthem’s Studies in Travel series, the collection originated in a research project carried out between the University of Glasgow and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, supported by the AHRC. Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant’s Tours in Scotland and Wales was published in 2017. While Thomas Pennant has been the subject of a number of surveys and biographies, my essay describes the characters of Pennant, Hunter and Stubbs, their interrelated interests and contributions to a cultural understanding of the production of knowledge of natural history, during the late eighteenth century. All three men were correspondents, and Hunter, along with Pennant, was an early patron of George Stubbs. These relationships are foregrounded in the essay and are demonstrated by reference to previously unpublished private letters and manuscripts, circulated between the three naturalists. My research highlights the affiliations between the visual arts and Enlightenment science, and puts Pennant into conversation with his close contemporaries. It describes how, during the 1770s, Pennant’s empirical, observational approach to the natural world became explicitly connected to the work of Hunter and Stubbs, and how these ideas were absorbed into debates surrounding the imitation and representation of nature within the Royal Academy of Arts. Contemporary notions of ‘truth to nature’ and direct observation which underlay the rhetoric of the travel narrative might also be read in terms of an anatomical tradition of autopsia – ‘to see with one’s own eyes’, as suggested in the essay; aligning studies of human and comparative anatomy, with established naturalist ‘field studies’ and first-hand accounts. In this sense, my research contributes a deep aesthetic consideration of scholarship pertaining to all three figures.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
