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13 Jan 2014

A new year and a new acquisition! I’m excited to say I’ve made my first purchase for the museum, and bought one or two companions for our new Stubbs Kangaroo and Dingo. Richard and I have discussed here before how the paintings were commissioned from George Stubbs by Joseph Banks on Banks’ return from the first Cook voyage. Stubbs did his best to represent these very foreign animals from a combination of skins, skulls and drawings. The drawings had been made by Sydney Parkinson, a young botanical artist who accompanied Banks on the voyage itself, creating ‘portraits’ of the specimens of flora and fauna that Banks and his assistant Daniel Solander collected en route. Parkinson began by producing full, detailed watercolours of each specimen, but the sheer quantity that Banks and Solander acquired forced him soon to reduce his records to simple pencil drawings with touches of watercolour to show the key characteristics. The idea was that Parkinson would then work for Banks on their return to London, turning his hundreds of delicate pencil drawings into full watercolours to be then engraved and published. But, Parkinson died of fever on the return voyage, only in his twenties. On Banks’ return, therefore, he employed a team of artists, to complete watercolours and engravings from Parkinson’s drawings. The major aim was a grand botanical publication, a Florilegium, of the new specimens found and recorded by Banks. It would be a masterpiece of Linnaean taxonomy, a vast gallery of plant portraits. A team of artists worked on this dream for almost fifteen years under Banks’ oversight, but for whatever reason the publication was never completed and produced. The drawings, watercolours, copperplates and engravings all passed to the British Museum in the 1820s after Banks’ death. In the 1980s, the (now) Natural History Museum finally fulfilled Banks dream, using the original copperplates to produce 738 beautiful colour engravings of plants from the Society Islands, New Zealand, Australia, Java, Brazil and Tierra del Fuego. It is one of these limited edition sets of engravings that Royal Museums Greenwich have been able to purchase, bringing together the three major artistic outputs of Cook’s first voyage, all produced under Banks’ patronage: the Stubbs paintings, the Florilegium, and the famous portrait of Captain Cook by Nathaniel Dance. All three formed an integral part of Banks’ self-presentation as a gentleman scientist and artistic patron in his house in Soho Square. We’ll be recreating a little bit of Banks’ world in the Queen’s House this year by putting our Stubbs, Dance and some of the Florilegium engravings together in the Art and Science of Exploration display, which will run alongside our Longitude show, Ships, Clocks and Stars. I’m dreaming up other plans for these wonderful engravings, but first all 738 of them need cataloguing and digitising so you too can marvel at them on our collections online. Watch this space …