The essay explores the close connections between Thomas Pennant, William Hunter and George Stubbs and their promotion and understanding of knowledge of natural history and natural philosophy as embodied within the fine arts, in drawings, prints and oil paintings. The essay explores affiliations between the visual arts and the project of Enlightenment science and puts Pennant into conversation with his close contemporaries. It describes how, during the 17770s, Pennant’s empirical, observational approach to the natural world became explicitly connected to the work of these two men, and how the ideas they exchanged were absorbed into the debates ‘surrounding the imitation and representation of nature within the cosmopolitan world of the Royal Academy of Arts and polite culture in London’. The essay explains how contemporary notions of ‘truth to nature’ and direct observation which underlay the rhetoric of the travel narrative can also be read in terms of an anatomical tradition of autopsia – ‘to see with one’s own eyes’.

• http://curioustravellers.ac.uk/en/