A voyage of discovery

Joseph Banks Esq (1774) by Sir Joshua Reynolds

Sir Joseph Banks (c.1814) by Thomas Phillips


JOSEPH BANKS

Joseph Banks was born on 13 February 1743, the son of a wealthy Lincolnshire landowner. He was educated at both Harrow and Eton, where he first became interested in botany, in preference to Greek and Latin. In December 1760 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford as a gentleman commoner. Finding that Humphrey Sibthorpe, the Botany Professor, gave no lectures he rode over to Cambridge and hired his own tutor to teach him in Oxford.

Banks’ father died in 1761 and three years later, on his twenty-first birthday, he came into a substantial inheritance. Rather than go on the traditional ‘grand tour’ he joined an expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador where he cemented his reputation as a serious naturalist.

When Banks heard that the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a Fellow in 1766, had appointed James Cook to lead an expedition to the South Seas to observe the transit of Venus, he persuaded the Society to allow him to join the party, at his own expense, as the expedition’s botanist. He took with him a staff of eight, including the distinguished Swedish naturalist Dr Daniel Solander and his secretary Herman Spöring, the two landscape and natural history artists Alexander Buchan and Sydney Parkinson, and his two favourite greyhounds.

In August 1768 His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour set sail from Plymouth and over the next three years circumnavigated the world, making landfalls at Madeira, Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the Society Islands (Tahiti), New Zealand, Australia and Java. At each location Banks and Solander collected plants, which were systematically recorded in the great cabin. Any plants new to European botany were passed to Sydney Parkinson, the natural history draughtsman, who made a field sketch with colour notes while the specimen was still fresh, working it up later into a finished portrait.

By the time the expedition returned to England in 1771, the collection contained some 30,000 plant specimens, over 1,300 new to science, and Parkinson had produced 955 drawings, of which 280 had been converted into full colour watercolours with botanical notes.

Determined to publish a grand scientific record of his botanical collection to the highest standard, Banks commissioned five artists to work up Parkinson’s field sketches to finished portraits and, for the next thirteen years, employed eighteen engravers to create exquisite copper plate engravings capturing every detail from the original watercolours. By 1784, 743 plates had been completed, but, for a variety of reasons, Banks delayed publication.

On his death in 1820, having been President of the Royal Society for forty years and recognised as the great panjandrum of European science, Banks bequeathed the unpublished plates for his Florilegium, together with his library and herbarium, to the British Museum. 160 years later, Alecto Historical Editions embarked on printing a first edition in colour.

The publication of 116 sets took ten years to complete and has been acknowledged as the most important achievement in the graphic arts in the twentieth century.

 

JOSEPH BANKS

Joseph Banks was born on 13 February 1743, the son of a wealthy Lincolnshire landowner. He was educated at both Harrow and Eton, where he first became interested in botany, in preference to Greek and Latin. In December 1760 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford as a gentleman commoner. Finding that Humphrey Sibthorpe, the Botany Professor, gave no lectures he rode over to Cambridge and hired his own tutor to teach him in Oxford.

Banks’ father died in 1761 and three years later, on his twenty-first birthday, he came into a substantial inheritance. Rather than go on the traditional ‘grand tour’ he joined an expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador where he cemented his reputation as a serious naturalist.

When Banks heard that the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a Fellow in 1766, had appointed James Cook to lead an expedition to the South Seas to observe the transit of Venus, he persuaded the Society to allow him to join the party, at his own expense, as the expedition’s botanist. He took with him a staff of eight, including the distinguished Swedish naturalist Dr Daniel Solander and his secretary Herman Spöring, the two landscape and natural history artists Alexander Buchan and Sydney Parkinson, and his two favourite greyhounds.

In August 1768 His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour set sail from Plymouth and over the next three years circumnavigated the world, making landfalls at Madeira, Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the Society Islands (Tahiti), New Zealand, Australia and Java. At each location Banks and Solander collected plants, which were systematically recorded in the great cabin. Any plants new to European botany were passed to Sydney Parkinson, the natural history draughtsman, who made a field sketch with colour notes while the specimen was still fresh, working it up later into a finished portrait.

By the time the expedition returned to England in 1771, the collection contained some 30,000 plant specimens, over 1,300 new to science, and Parkinson had produced 955 drawings, of which 280 had been converted into full colour watercolours with botanical notes.

Determined to publish a grand scientific record of his botanical collection to the highest standard, Banks commissioned five artists to work up Parkinson’s field sketches to finished portraits and, for the next thirteen years, employed eighteen engravers to create exquisite copper plate engravings capturing every detail from the original watercolours. By 1784, 743 plates had been completed, but, for a variety of reasons, Banks delayed publication.

On his death in 1820, having been President of the Royal Society for forty years and recognised as the great panjandrum of European science, Banks bequeathed the unpublished plates for his Florilegium, together with his library and herbarium, to the British Museum. 160 years later, Alecto Historical Editions embarked on printing a first edition in colour.

The publication of 116 sets took ten years to complete and has been acknowledged as the bmost important achievement in the graphic arts in the twentieth century.

 

Captain James Cook by Nathaniel Dance (1837)

Dr Solander (detail of a painting) by William Parry (1775)

Sydney Parkinson by an unknown artist (c.1767)


Historical Map of Cook's Voyages

Map of the HM Endeavour's voyage marked in red; From Joseph Banks’ Florilegium, Botanical Treasures from Cook’s First Voyage, Thames & Hudson (2017)