Date: 03-07-2005
Owning Institution: The National Gallery, London
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph Features  
Subject:   19th Century  18th Century    

There are those who misguidedly believe that they cannot possibly be interested in the work of Stubbs, England’s principal equestrian painter, simply because they are not interested in horses. Such people should be frogmarched to the National Gallery and forcibly persuaded to pay a visit to its forthcoming exhibition, “Stubbs and the Horse”. This is not merely because it promises to be one of the most enthralling shows of the year, but also because it should, for once and for all, put paid to the foolish misconception that Stubbs was no more than a gifted animalier in the service of the Georgian aristocracy – a mere animal painter, recording the appearance and the equine feats of those sleek thoroughbred horses ridden, raced and treasured by the milords and miladies of eighteenth century England. He was far more than that.
 

George Stubbs (1724-1806) was not only one of the greatest British painters to have lived, but the equal of any of his European contemporaries. A brilliant draughtsman, he was gifted with a control of line not seen in England since the time of Holbein. Technical excellence aside, he was a painter-philosopher and a student of science – a true man of the Enlightenment, whose work gave expression to numerous shifts, both great and subtle, in the very texture of European thought. Small wonder, then, that the versifier Peter Pindar should have written “’Tis said that nought so much the temper rubs / Of that ingenious artist, Mister Stubbs, / As calling him a horse painter …”

Because Stubbs wrote little during the course of his long life, his character and temperament remain something of a mystery. What can be said about him with certainty is that he was a slow developer and a largely self-taught man. Until he was about 16, he helped in his father’s leather-working business in Liverpool. He then found employment in the studio of a local artist of distinctly limited talents, one Hamlet Winstanley, who gave his new apprentice the edifying but ultimately constricting task of copying a number of pictures in the collection of the 11^th Earl of Derby. Tiring of such drudgery, Stubbs left Winstanley to teach himself more about the rudiments of painting at home. Then, in 1745, he took the unusual step of moving to York, to study anatomy at York Hospital. While there, he assisted at the dissections of Dr John Burton and produced a series of illustrations to the surgeon’s Essay towards a Complete New System of Midwifery.

Lacking the money to pursue his anatomical interests, Stubbs spent the next decade and more drifting between Liverpool, Leeds, Wigan, York and Hull, working as a freelance facepainter to the local gentry. He also visited Rome, briefly, failing to broaden his client base but acquiring that lifelong preference for classical measure and restraint that marks so many of his greatest compositions. The fact that only three portraits by his hand have been identified, from this entire period of his life, suggests how close he came to slipping into obscurity.
 

The pattern of his life may have been restless, but it seems that the young Stubbs was, from the start, a man with a plan. He was to set himself apart from the herd of generally ill-educated eighteenth-century British painters by uniting science and art – by establishing a technique of painting that would be firmly grounded in empirical experiment and observation. He was unable to pursue that ambition, for want of funds, until he was in his early thirties. But as soon as Stubbs had accumulated enough money to further his researches, he embarked on a unique and arduous project of self-education. At some point, and for unknown reasons, he had decided to branch out into equestrian painting. So it was that in 1756 he set out to master the entire anatomy of the horse. For eighteen months he locked himself away in an isolated farmhouse at Horkstow in Lincolnshire, a location chosen for its proximity to a number of tanneries, from which the artist was able to obtain a regular supply of dead horses. Stubbs’s methods were described by his friend Ozias Humphry:
 

“The first subject that he procured, was a horse which was bled to death by the jugular vein; after which the arteries and veins were injected. A bar of iron was then suspended from the ceiling of the room by a teagle to which iron hooks of varying sizes and lengths were fixed. Under this bar a plank was swung about 18 inches wide for the horse’s feet to rest upon and the animal was suspended to the iron bar by the above mentioned hooks … He first began by dissecting and designing the muscles of the abdomen proceeding through five different layers of muscles till he came to the peritoricum and the pleura, through which appeared the lungs and the intestines. Afterwards, the bowels were taken out, and cast away. Then he proceeded to dissect the head by first stripping off the skin, and after having cleaned and prepared the muscles, etcetera, for the drawing, he made careful design of them and wrote the explanations which usually employed him a whole day. He then took off another layer of muscles, which he prepared, designed and described in the same manner … and so he proceeded until he came to the skeleton.”
 

Stubbs told another of his associates, the surgeon Henry Cline, that he worked on one of the horse carcasses in this manner for all of eleven weeks. The paradoxical fruit of all his bloody and malodorous labours was a hygienically beautiful and grandly scaled folio, The Anatomy of the Horse. The work was eventually published in 1766, although the raw materials for it helped to establish Stubbs’s name considerably earlier than that.
 

In 1758, the artist moved to London where, armed with his unprecedentedly precise drawings of equine muscle, sinew and bone, he soon won significant commissions from the leading noblemen of the day. Men such as the future Prime Minister, Lord Rockingham, and Charles Lennox, 3^rd Earl of Richmond, were quick to grasp that here was an artist who could paint their prize thoroughbreds more accurately than any other British painter of the time. Stubbs’s principal patrons, nearly all of whom were founder-members of the still fledgling Jockey Club, were justifiably delighted with his ability to create likenesses of their favourite horses so accurate that they might be considered as nothing less than equine portraits. Previous British painters of horseflesh, such as John Wootton and James Seymour, had concentrated on colour and distinctive markings, such as the “white socks” on the various lower legs of many a horse, to distinguish one animal from another. But Stubbs could capture every detail of musculature and conformation as well, creating painted mares and stallions so seemingly alive that the viewer could, in imagination, caress each curve of flank or neck, feel the ribs beneath the skin. The startling novelty of Stubbs’s work was not lost on his contemporaries. “Previous to the professional emanations of this gentleman,” commented one of his many admirers, “we were so barbarous as to regard with pleasure the work of Seymour.”
 

Stubbs composed several of his earliest horse paintings in a rather archaic fashion, by combining more than one moment of time within a single image. For example he would show, side by side, both the race and the unsaddling of the winning horse. Or he would squeeze together a group of huntsmen and their mounts at rest, and those same riders and horses in pursuit of a fox, all on the same canvas. But soon he was designing his pictures with the same originality, the same spare and austere directness, that he brought to the task of painting each individual horse. His mature work is marked by a strong preference, unusual among sporting painters, for moments of stillness and reflection. Stubbs increasingly favoured the moment, not of the race itself, but of its aftermath or prelude. He painted horses after their exertions, being comforted by stablelads or trainers. He painted them in the relative peace of stable and pasture, tended by their grooms or even, on occasion, accompanied by other animals. For the colourful Irish gambler and owner-breeder Dennis O’Kelly, he depicted the racer and stallion Dungannon, one of the many successful sons of the great Eclipse, alone in a field with the sheep that was his constant companion – and without which, his handlers noted, the horse was liable to become extremely fractious.
 

To the men and women for whom Stubbs painted, the horse was a symbol of great antiquity as well as a creature to race and ride. One of the most celebrated of antique statues – one which Stubbs would doubtless have seen on his fleeting visit to Rome – was a famous Roman sculpture of Marcus Aurelius on horseback, which had inspired countless imitations in Renaissance and Baroque art. Titian, Velazquez and Van Dyck, whose equestrian portrait of Charles I hangs in the National Gallery, painted illustrious European monarchs seated on fiery but appropriately subdued steeds. The horse in such pictures stands for the unruly passions which the ruler has mastered within himself, as well as for the nation which he at once tames and guides. In one of his most famous paintings, the extraordinary, near-life-size portrait of Lord Rockingham’s prize horse, Whistlejacket, isolated on a plain ground like an equestrian statue come to life, Stubbs subtly reversed that chain of associations. The rearing horse was originally to have served as the mount in an equestrian portrait of George II, but on reflection patron and artist daringly decided to leave the king out of the picture – intending, perhaps, to symbolise the proud British tradition of parliamentary independence from monarchy.
 

A strain of subversive implication runs through much of Stubbs’ equestrian art. He pays an unusual amount of attention to the humble lads and grooms who handle the horses of the aristocracy, observing them with such careful, attentive sympathy, and on occasion lending them such dignity, that he seems to be questioning the very assumptions of innate social hierarchy on which their lowly position rests. In the great picture that is, perhaps, his masterpiece, Hambletonian, Rubbing Down – a much to be regretted absentee, incidentally, from the National Gallery exhibition – such suggestions of freethinking radicalism seem to harden into a palpable discontent with the status quo. The picture was commissioned as a kind of trophy, to celebrate the triumph of Henry Vane-Tempest’s thoroughbred Hambletonian in a famous match, during the course of which, according to a contemporary eyewitness account, the horse was “shockingly goaded”. In Stubbs’s hands, the work became something very different and far more moving. As they rub down the exhausted horse’s bloody flanks, lad and trainer stare out of the picture with eyes that seem both haunted and accusatory. Vane-Tempest disliked the picture so much that Stubbs had to take him to court to get paid fo it.
 

No one has ever painted the relationship between the human being and the horse more feelingly than Stubbs. In doing so, he encapsulated a great shift in Western man’s attitude both towards animals and more generally to the whole natural world. Stubbs painted at a time when Enlightenment thinkers had begun to question the centuries-old theocentric view of Creation, in which man, made in God’s image, was seen as quite separate from and entirely superior to all other living creatures. Instead, the idea developed that people were far more like animals than had previously been supposed. Much of Stubbs’s work as a horse-painter carries this implication, but he developed it still further in his very last and never-to-be-completed project, an extraordinary sequel to The Anatomy of the Horse putatively titled A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body, with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl. As Malcolm Warner writes, in the impressive catalogue to the National Gallery’s exhibition, “In this vast and ambitious work he pursued further than any previous anatomist the idea that seemingly disparate creatures were connected by fundamental physical similarities.”