Northern Italian Painting and Naturalism: Robert Strange, William Hunter and the Royal Academy of Arts

‘This was the school, that to the dignity of the Antique, join’d all the beauty of living Nature.’
Horace Walpole, 1742

The physician, William Hunter (1718-1783), was appointed first Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 and his collection of paintings, along with his lectures to students, represents a selection of materials originating from a founding member of the Academy in its early years. The majority of Hunter’s paintings came from the Northern Italian schools and were purchased from the Scottish artist Robert Strange (1721-1792), who had gathered them on a tour of Italy in the 1760s. Strange had set out to form: ‘… a collection of pictures upon a principle different from what the generality of purchasers had hitherto followed.’ While he spent some time in Rome, Strange’s tour focused on the northern provinces of Italy, particularly the university towns of Bologna and Parma. For Strange and Hunter, paintings from the Northern Italian tradition exemplified the interconnectedness of natural philosophy and the fine arts, and signified a pedagogical principle of empiricism that offered up an alternative history of art, one which was sympathetic to eighteenth-century notions of reason and nature. Strange’s purpose was to take back to Britain a selection of works that foregrounded the teaching of naturalism. While such pragmatism might appear in opposition to the Royal Academy’s promotion of a ‘grand style’, an emphasis on observation and experimentation was one of the institution’s original aims, suggested by the words: ‘Where Art may join with Nature and with Sense’ in the commemorative verse, The Triumph of the Arts (1769), and typified by Hunter’s appointment, as explained in this paper.

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