Sir Joseph Banks

Sir Joseph Banks KGB (1743–1820), occasionally characterised, justly, as the ‘father of Australia’, was the powerful President of London’s Royal Society for more than forty years, from 1778 to 1820. Banks grew up on his father’s Lincolnshire estate and sharpened his interest in botany at Eton and Oxford. At the age of twenty-five, he suggested to the council of the Royal Society that they recommend him for inclusion on the voyage of the Endeavour, commanded by James Cook. On the three-year trip, he and Daniel Solander collected hundreds of specimens of plants and animals of the South Seas. For the rest of his life Banks was one of the sparkling stars of Enlightenment London. It was he who endorsed New South Wales as a site for a penal settlement; he was a patron of Matthew Flinders and others; and he corresponded zestfully with all the early governors of New South Wales. From 1788 to about 1810, though Banks held no official post (there was no ‘master plan’ for the settlement of the Colony, nor Department to administer it) he was a continuous advocate for the colony and his role as effective head of Australian affairs was widely acknowledged. Late in life, Banks’s chief interests were the development of superior sheep varieties and the drainage of the Lincolnshire fens to create pasture. It is largely down to Banks’s personal enthusiasm for merino sheep that specimens of the breed were established in Australia within a couple of decades of English settlement. John Macarthur was able to purchase seven rams and three ewes at the first public auction of merinos, supervised by Banks, near the Pagoda at Kew Gardens on 15 August 1804. Six of the beasts survived to land at Sydney on 7 July 1805. As a result, in years to come, England’s irksome dependence on European wool would be eased.

Benjamin West (1738–1820) began his painting of Banks in 1771–72, about five months after Banks returned from his fabulous trip to the Pacific. Now housed in Lincolnshire, West’s life-sized portrait shows the twenty-nine- year-old Banks surrounded by, and draped in, souvenirs of his voyage. John Raphael Smith’s (1752–1812) mezzotint print of the painting was first issued by Hooper and Smith in 1773. Smith was a draper’s assistant and miniature painter before turning to engraving in London. He was appointed engraver to the Prince of Wales; he engraved about forty works of Joshua Reynolds’s; he ran a print dealership; and he created some excellent portraits in crayon. He was learned, and a brilliant raconteur, and his body of work included some of the finest eighteenth-century English engravings; yet his ‘dissipated habits’ militated against his prosperity, and he died with his career on a steep downward trajectory in Doncaster.