Sir Joseph Banks 18th century

Josiah Wedgwood created this Jasperware cameo of Sir Joseph Banks sometime in the late 18th century. Banks, a botanist, and Wedgwood, a potter, were both members of the Lunar Society, a dinner club of industrialists and natural philosophers interested in science, technology, and manufacture. Wedgwood mass-produced cameos like this one to be set as jewelry or mounted as small-scale portraits. As a material, Jasperware was associated with high status and emulated the appearance of ancient Greek and Roman carved gemstones, but the context in which these cameos circulated raises important questions about identity, class, and colonialism. Banks accompanied Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the Pacific, during which he collected specimens from places all over the world. Banks’s work advanced scientific knowledge, but it was also directly tied to colonial projects of exploration and extraction. Consider how Wedgwood’s mass-produced portrait of Banks participates in the construction of celebrity, and how both men profited from the economic systems of their time.