Thomas Pennant, William Hunter and George Stubbs shared a remarkably similar ambition for the ways in which the fine arts might be put to use in the production of knowledge of natural history in the second half of the eighteenth century. Each understood how the activities of naturalists encompassed Enlightenment values by considering the study of the natural world in ‘an enlarged view’. In this sense, and for Stubbs and Hunter in particular, this meant incorporating anatomy within the broader realm of the natural sciences that typically featured subject matters such as geology and zoology, alongside astronomy and knowledge of climates. During the 1770s Thomas Pennant's close observational approach to the natural world became explicitly connected to the work of William Hunter and George Stubbs and consequently featured among the debates surrounding the imitation and representation of nature within the cosmopolitan world of the Royal Academy of Arts and polite culture in London. How Pennant's research for his publications of natural history, British Zoology and Arctic Zoology, and for his tours of Wales and Scotland contributed to an ‘empirical habit of vision’, in common with Hunter and Stubbs, is described in this essay. Pennant also understood that the relationship between travel and natural history was inextricable; alongside the pursuit of antiquities, natural history involved traversing the landscape, locally and nationally, in order to carry out field studies. Travel was an accepted preoccupation of the naturalist and antiquarian: ‘& you well know that natural history is not to be acquired in a closet’, as the antiquarian Thomas Falconer remarked to Sir Joseph Banks, alluding to the conventional view of the savant immersed in his private study, closed off from the elements. While Pennant was a gentleman with time to spare on his ‘disinterested’ pursuit of natural knowledge, William Hunter and George Stubbs were both professional men who earned their living as anatomist and artist respectively.