Art review: William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum, The Hunterian, Glasgow

William Hunter’s portrait by his friend Allan Ramsay personifies the Scottish Enlightenment. In its evident truthfulness it is thoroughly empirical, the defining characteristic of Enlightenment thought, but the picture is also luminous with the sitter’s intelligence and humanity, not as abstract qualities, but as an aspect of his social being and indeed of his presence, right there, as a friend of the painter. It reminds us that the Enlightenment was not shaped by mere rationalism. On the contrary, its great thinkers, David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and others established the place in our understanding of the world and of each other of sympathy, imagination, feeling and the non-rational faculties.