Next Saturday being Derby Day, this week’s picture is George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, the quintessential portrait of the thoroughbred racehorse, fleet of foot and wild of eye. Painted, startlingly, to the scale of life, it was commissioned in 1761 by Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2^nd Marquess of Rockingham and briefly Prime Minister of England, to preserve the memory of his pride and joy: a bay colt by Mogul out of an unnamed dam by the Hampton Court Chestnut Arabian. Rockingham’s desire to possess such an unnervingly large and vital image of this particular racehorse may have had something to do with the fact that Whistlejacket had recently defeated the highly rated Brutus in a match at York races, thus winning his lordship the sum of 2,000 guineas – approximately £130,000 in modern money.

 

According to Stubbs’s contemporary, Ozias Humphry, Whistlejacket did not take kindly to being painted. Humphry recorded that at the last of several outdoor “sittings” for the picture, while a stableboy led him backwards and forwards in front of the artist at his easel, the mettlesome horse suddenly caught a glimpse of his own image. He began to “stare and look wildly at the picture, endeavouring to get at it, to fight and to kick it” until Stubbs had to intervene, pummelling Whistlejacket “with his palette and Mahl stick” until the horse calmed down. The story, which is suspiciously similar to the tale told by Pliny about the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis painting a vine so realistically that birds tried to eat from it, was probably made up. Humphry had a habit of embroidering the truth and it seems unlikely that Stubbs would have painted such a large canvas out of doors, especially at a time when plein air painting was only rarely practiced. But metaphorically if not actually the artist did subdue Whistlejacket with the tools of his trade, composing and organising unruly animal energies into an image of absolute albeit nervy grace. The consummate artifice of Stubbs’s image is further enhanced by the unusual and completely original device of the abstract background - a much debated aspect of the painting, which seems to have baffled many of the artist’s contemporaries.

 

Stubbs, the son of a Liverpudlian currier, was a largely self-taught artist. His training was rooted in empirical science. He had studied anatomy at York hospital, where he was employed by Dr John Burton to illustrate his Essay towards a Complete New System of Midwifery. Then he had made his own special study of equine anatomy, spending some 18 months in a farmhouse in Lincolnshire close to several tanneries which supplied him with the carcases of horses. He devised his own system of winches and pulleys to haul them into lifelike positions, gradually removing layers of skin and muscle until he got down to the bone, making detailed drawings which he subsequently engraved and published under the title The Anatomy of the Horse. It was this publication which brought him to the attention of noblemen such as Rockingham, many of them members of the newly founded Jockey Club, who quickly realised that Stubbs could paint their beloved thoroughbreds with a quite new and unparalleled degree of realism.

The racehorse carried grander associations in the eighteenth century than now. The thoroughbred colt was not only a prized possession, in aristocratic circles, but an equine symbol of aristocracy itself. Hung as it once was in the great marble pile of Wentworth Wodehouse, the Rockingham family home, Whistlejacket must have impressed its owner as a powerfully impressive embodiment of the idea that impeccable breeding produces innate superiority.

Breeding and keeping horses – Rockingham kept a string of 200 at the stud farm on his Yorkshire estate – was a noble diversion which could also be justified on patriotic grounds. In an age when the successful conduct of war depended to a great extent on large divisions of cavalry, milord’s horses were seen as a form of military reserve. Riding out and hunting were viewed not merely as entertainment but also as ideal ways to train young men for war. The apparently placid Georgian gentleman on his horse symbolised among other things the unflustered might of the nation, its ever-readiness for combat. (The strong historical link between equestrian pursuits and the British sense of nationhood may partly explain the depth of the opposition to a ban on hunting, which has so surprised the Labour Party.) 

But Whistlejacket is a very unusual English picture, not only because of its scale and unconventional blank background but also because the horse is riderless. There had been equestrian paintings of this size before but traditionally a king, or some equivalent authority figure, was to be found on the horse’s back. The symbolism of such works was straightforward: his royal highness, sitting astride his fiery steed with perfect sang-froid, controls its every movement just as surely as he controls the destiny of his potentially unruly people. But why should Stubbs have painted – and Rockingham have wanted – such a monumental picture of a barebacked horse?