Sir Joseph Banks & 13956 Banks Asteroid - London, England, UK
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 51° 31.131 W 000° 07.573
30U E 699376 N 5711441
This is one of at least two busts of Banks in the British Museum.
Waymark Code: WMDJYZ
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 01/22/2012
Views: 4
Located inside the British Museum (which does not charge an admission fee), this life-sized 1814 bronze bust depicts Banks in middle-age with a determined look. He wears a coat with an open collar and seems to be looking at something or someone closeby.
The Museum's website (
visit link) adds:
"Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), the noted botanist and plant collector, travelled to Newfoundland in 1766, and to Iceland in 1772 to study and gather plants. With his librarian, Dr Daniel Solander (died 1782), Banks accompanied Captain James Cook on his first voyage round the world in the ship Endeavour.
Banks was a member of the Society of Dilettanti, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and became President of the Royal Society. The scientific community founded the Royal Institution at his London home, where his herbarium of 23,400 species and his extensive library was open for study. The botanical collections and library were acquired by The British Museum in 1827; the natural history collections are now in the Natural History Museum, and the library forms part of the British Library.
The sculptor Anne Damer (1748-1828) began to work in bronze around 1800. At this time bronze was mainly used for public sculpture and was extremely expensive. The full-face pose, the classical pedestal and the signature in Greek cut into the metal at the back of the collar- 'ANNA EMOPIE DAMER ET' ('Anna Seymour Damer made it') - deliberately echo Greek sculptural traditions."
As for the asteroid, Wikipedia's brief entry (
visit link) indicates that it was named after Sir Joseph Banks and adds:
"13956 Banks (1990 VG6) is a main-belt asteroid discovered on November 15, 1990 by E. W. Elst at the European Southern Observatory."