John Hunter

This portraitback to top

NPG 1712 and NPG 4288 are taken from the life mask belonging to the Royal College of Surgeons, London. [1] NPG 4288, which is less subtle than the plaster NPG 1712, is one of three bronze casts made by the firm of Morris Singer in 1962; another was presented to the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, and the third retained by the College.
Hunter described having such a mask taken: ‘when I had plaster of Paris applied to my face to make a mould, in the taking it off, it produced a kind of suction on the fore part of the nose’. [2] It is not clear exactly when this mask was taken; William Norris, in his Hunterian Lecture in 1825, alleged that it was Reynolds who had asked Hunter ‘to let a caste be taken from his face’, a story elaborated by Keith in 1919. [3]

Footnotesback to top

1) W. LeFanu, A Catalogue of the Portraits and other paintings drawings and sculpture in the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1960, p 42 (127); illus. S. Taylor, John Hunter and his Painters, Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1993, fig.3.
2) J. Hunter, A Treatise on the Blood ..., 1794, p 65; the Treatise was ‘first arranged’ in 1762 but continually revised; the date of 1781 is mentioned in the final text.
3) W. Norris, Hunterian Oration, 1825, p 35; Sir A. Keith fancifully suggested (Lancet, 18 October 1919, p 710) that Reynolds’s request was made in order to get rid of the straggly beard seen in one version of the 1786 portrait (see NPG 77, n19).

Provenanceback to top

Presented by the Royal College of Surgeons, London, 1962.


This extended catalogue entry is from the out-of-print National Portrait Gallery collection catalogue: John Ingamells, National Portrait Gallery: Mid-Georgian Portraits 1760-1790, National Portrait Gallery, 2004, and is as published then. For the most up-to-date details on individual Collection works, we recommend reading the information provided in the Search the Collection results on this website in parallel with this text.

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