Joseph Dalton Hooker

A carte-de-visite portrait of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the nineteenth century. Hooker was a founder of geographical botany, and Charles Darwin's closest friend. For twenty years he was Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and was awarded the highest honours of British science.

He collected zoological and geological specimens on a voyage to the Antarctic (1839-1843) and was later a part of an expedition to the Himalayas and India (1847-1851). In 1860 he travelled to Syria and Palestine and in 1871 he visited Morocco. In 1877 he undertook a voyage to America to study the flora of the eastern United States.

Photographed at Sawyer’s Italian Studio in Norwich.

A small paper label pasted over the lower margin gives the date when the portrait was published, 2 September 1868.