Artwork Information

In 1772, the renowned British explorer and botanist Joseph Banks (1743-1820) sat to the eminent painter Sir Joshua Reynolds for his first portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Not yet thirty, Banks was already a celebrity, having recently returned from his three-year voyage to the South Pacific with James Cook, visiting Brazil, Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia between 1768 and 1771. He appears in his study wearing a fur-trimmed coat seated at a table in the presence of a globe and some books, his closed fist weighing down a stack of letters on which can be read the inscription from Horace’s Odes, 1, 7: Cras ingens iterabimus aequor: `Tomorrow we set out over the vast sea', thought to be a reference to the fact that Banks had recently been invited to accompany Cook on a second voyage.

Reynolds’s oil painting of Banks was exhibited at the 5th annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1773. The London engraver William Dickinson, who had a close working relationship with Reynolds, produced a mezzotint engraving of the celebrated oil painting, dated 30 January 1774, from his printers’ addresses in Bond Street and Charing Cross, London.