The King George III Collection

In 1727, Queen Caroline ordered the construction of a hermitage at Kew. This building, in its carefully contrived rustic setting, signalled an attitude to nature in which the work of human beings blended with that of the Creator. The hermitage was ornamented by busts of two men of science, Newton and Boyle. For showing her appreciation of men of genius in this way, Caroline was mocked by the poet Jonathan Swift, who, in a pointed comparison with 'Lewis' of France, attacked her for refusing patronage:

Lewis the living genious fed,
And raised the Scientific Head;
Our Q----, more frugal of her Meat
Raises those heads which cannot eat.

By the 1760s, the hermitage had been dismantled and an observatory put in its place.