On George Stubbs
The tricentenary of the great English painter
THIS YEAR MARKS the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of George Stubbs (b. 1724), the great English painter of the eighteenth-century who elevated the lowly genre of animal painting onto the grandest level.
As there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot going on to mark this anniversary, I’ve taken it upon myself to give an online lecture on the great painting Whistlejacket, hanging in the National Gallery, which since it entered the collection in 1997 has become one of the best-loved paintings on display.
I find it endlessly fascinating: the sense of animal wildness combined with aristocratic ownership; the profound anatomical knowledge that Stubbs brought to painting the animal, a thoroughbred owned by a certain Lord Rockingham; the place it holds in the fascinating history of thoroughbreds themselves, which when it was painted in 1762 were a new breed of horse, created in England by crossing Arabian Stallions with English mares; and the striking modernity of the horse painted against a monochrome background.
I love watching people stop and look at Stubbs’s painting, take photos, pose with it, wander around the gallery and invariably return for a second look. You can see it the length of the gallery, which I estimate to be around two furlongs (it would be three if the Sainsbury Wing were open), in one of the greatest sightlines in any museum. You can walk the length of the National Gallery, as if Whistlejacket were galloping towards you, through the ages of art.
This article was first published in The Daily Telegraph, 3rd August 2024:
ONE OF THE EARLIEST KNOWN IMAGES in British art is the engraving on bone of a horse’s head, found in 1876 at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire. It was found amongst the bones of numerous animals, hyenas, woolly rhinoceros, cave lions, bears and reindeer, remarkable evidence of one of the few known Ice Age settlements in ancient Britain, when the island landscape was bleak treeless tundra.
Many thousands of years later the English artist George Stubbs painted romantic scenes of horses in combat with lions at Cresswell Crags, unaware of the thrilling Upper Palaeolithic deposits beneath his feet. You might be forgiven for thinking that somehow, subconsciously, he did. Stubbs was of the most original of English painters, an artist who saw beneath the surface of life, both in a philosophical sense, but also quite literally, in his anatomical studies of horses.
Stubbs’s interest in anatomy arose early in life, in the middle years of the eighteen-hundreds, and found its first expression in drawings of embryos in the womb, illustrations for a pioneering manual on midwifery by Dr John Burton (caricatured as ‘Dr Slop’ in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy). Stubbs had performed the dissections himself on women who had died during childbirth, drawing as he went. He had been studying anatomy and subsequently giving lectures at York Hospital, although dissection was still a shady undertaking; obtaining corpses was still a secretive activity (unless you were prepared to wait for the slim pickings of the hangman) dependent on the grim profession of the ‘Resurrections’ – corpse diggers. Aside from the moral dubiousness — Stubbs was said to have a ‘vile reputation’ for his dissection of women — there was also the acute risk of infection a time before antiseptic preparations.
Perhaps as a result of this reputation (details of Stubbs’s biography are scant, to say the least), in 1756 he took himself to the village of Horkstow in Lincolnshire, to spend eighteen months dissecting and drawing horses in a barn. He was accompanied only by a woman, Mary Spencer, who may or may not have been by that time his common-law wife. It was a gruesome task — acquiring living horses, probably destined for the knacker’s yard, leading them to the barn where they were bled to death, injected with preservatives, hung from the ceiling, and then progressively dissected. At each layer of dissection, right down to the skeletal structure, Stubbs worked on precise drawings, positioning the horses in life-like poses as if they were walking or simply standing, undressed of their skin. He got through a fair number, each lasting no more than a couple of months before putrefaction made further work impossible.
For many years only twelve of the drawings Stubbs made were thought to have survived — the finished, worked-up drawings he made in preparation for publication. During the 1960s a mysterious package was discovered in a dusty corner of the Royal Academy, which when opened was found to contain thirty or so sheets clearly from Stubbs’s hand, the actual working drawings he had made directly from the horse, some of them which appear still to have traces of blood and viscera.
Stubbs, by all reports, lived up in part to his name by the stubbornness with which he pursued his difficult projects. The story continues that he took his portfolio of drawings to London, but could find nobody skilled enough to engrave them, so spent years teaching himself the technique to produce the plates for his book The Anatomy of the Horse, which finally appeared in 1766.
It was the book that made his name, and also launched his career as a painter of thoroughbred horses for wealthy patrons. These were, in effect, a form of portraiture, at a time when portrait-painting was one of the few ways that artists could make a living. His great painting of Whistlejacket, an Arabian chestnut stallion in the highly-trained position of ‘levade’ (not ‘rearing’, as it is mis-described in the catalogue of the National Gallery where the painting hangs), was commissioned by Charles Watson-Wentworth, the Marquess of Rockingham and, fortunately for Stubbs, one of the richest men in Europe. His house of Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire was full of sculpture commissioned from artists in Italy, but it was his favourite thoroughbred stallion that he commissioned Stubbs to portray. Thoroughbreds – ‘Bedouin of Arabia, nourished on English grass’, in the memorable words of Geoffrey Grigson — were a relatively new arrival on this island, a cross between eastern stallions and English mares, bred for speed but also for their sheer physical beauty. Contrary to what you often hear, Whistlejacket was a success on the field, winning many races and much money, and famous enough to be mentioned by Oliver Goldsmith in his play She Stoops to Conquer: ‘I have got you a pair of horses that will fly like Whistlejacket’.
Stubbs was perfectly qualified to capture the individual appearance of Whistlejacket, which was entirely the purpose of thoroughbred painting. The sense of a profound knowledge of the organic structure beneath the surface of the horse’s body, the way the parts fit together and life flows through the forms is remarkable to behold, standing in the gallery on Trafalgar Square. Alongside Whistlejacket Stubbs painted a scene of Mares and Foals for his patron, Rockingham, that might be counted as one of his greatest visualisations of animal life – a scene of two mares and three foals against a monochrome background, in which the focus is entirely on the personality and interrelation of the animals as vivid and particularised living beings. (The painting used to be on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, but is now in a private collection).
The radically experimental curiosity that had driven Stubbs to his dissections propelled him into a great realm of animal painting far beyond the familiar image of the horse. He sketched the noisy menagerie in the Tower of London, with caged tigers, bears, ostriches and a baboon, and made paintings from animals kept by wealthy patrons, including the first zebra to be seen in England, given as a present to Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, and kept in the menagerie at Buckingham Palace (then Buckingham House). For his great patrons the surgeon and anatomists William and John Hunter (brothers), he painted a nilghau, a pygmy antelope, a moose, and a morose looking rhinoceros, and Two Views of the Torpedo, Male and Female — the first specimens of the flat fish known in England. All the paintings (with the exception of the torpedo, now lost) hang in the Hunterian Museum, part of the Royal College of Surgeons on Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London.
These paintings of exotic beasts show not only Stubbs’s great curiosity, but also an idea of painting as a source of scientific knowledge. ‘Good painting of animals give much clearer ideas than descriptions’, wrote William Hunter, on presenting a paper about the ‘Nyl-ghau’ to the Royal Society. After seeing Stubbs’s painting, you would be sure to know a nilghau if you met one.
Whether in his visual research he was the English Leonardo, as is so often claimed, is another question. Stubbs most likely knew of the great stash of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings held at Windsor Castle, rediscovered during his lifetime. His The Anatomy of the Horse was the realisation of a project that Leonardo, the undisputed pioneer of comparative anatomy, had intended but, like so many of his grand ideas, never brought to completion. Stubbs, like Leonardo, was a great technical experimenter, pioneering a technique of painting with enamel, that led to a collaboration with Josiah Wedgewood who created ceramic supports upon which Stubbs painted.
And yet in the final count they remain very different artists. Where Leonardo’s boundless imagination took in a great range of subjects — mechanics, optics, hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, as well as religious subjects and profoundly poetic portraits, Stubbs remained fixated on animal anatomy, creating paintings of an entirely different nature to those by Leonardo. It is certainly true to say of Stubbs that he elevated the genre of sporting painting to ‘high art’, but his crucial contribution, aside from anatomical exactitude, was to give his animals psychological expression and depth. Unlike Leonardo, who was driven by the search for universals, Stubbs painted psychological portraits of individual animals. ‘His dogs and horses are the real, living thing’, wrote Joseph Mayer, one of his early biographers. ‘Stubbs was the first to paint animals as they are… and never showed an immortal soul in a poodle’s eye’. Such an immortal soul emanating from an animal eye was entirely the point of Leonardo.
It has become a commonplace to say that Stubbs was more than a painter of horses, although it is less commonly heard that he is an equal to the greatest of English painters, of Reynolds in his own time, and Constable and Turner in the next century. Many of his paintings remain secluded in private collections, so that our view of him still remains partial – and not helped by the lack of any major showing of his work in Britain during this, his tricentenary year. That many of his works remain in the family collections for which they were first commissioned is the subject for the beguiling film Bloodlines, by the artist Amie Siegel, which follows the transportation of paintings by Stubbs to an exhibition of his work at the Milton Keynes Gallery in 2019. That Stubbs remains a vital painter for our times can be seen in the responses to his work by contemporary artists. Painstaking horse paintings by Mark Wallinger are currently paired with works by Stubbs at a small collection display at Tate Britain (although not Wallinger’s eery x-ray photograph image of Whistlejacket with the addition of a unicorn horn). The artist Hugo Wilson has also responded to Whistlejacket, putting the horse in wild bucking bronco poses, a sense of unbridled animal life also captured by images in The Problem Horse & Other Stories, a book published earlier this year by the artist Julie Sleaford. The gory story of Stubbs’s dissection of horses appears as an inspiration for Dexter Dalwood in the painting Track and Turf 1754, included his exhibition English Painting currently at the Lisson Gallery in London.
For all the captivating quality of his anatomical drawings, and his penetrating and psychological visions of animal life, it is the sheer modernity of Stubbs’s world, and the English landscape that he so excelled at painting, that draws us (or at least me) most to his work. One of my earliest encounters with his painting was standing on the balcony gallery at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, communing with one of his greatest Newmarket paintings Gimcrack with John Pratt up on Newmarket Heath. The jockey John Pratt gazes thoughtfully into the distance with the air of an ancient sage or philosopher. His horse Gimcrack also appears to be lost in thought, perhaps more with trepidation at the race for which they are training that morning. They stand silent and still in a space that appears both familiar and entirely out of time. A solitary white post on the left balances the composition like a perfectly-placed punctuation mark. To the right, the monumental form of a rubbing-down house has the presence of an Egyptian pyramid. In other Newmarket paintings these minimalist structures are the sole subject, emphasising the vast emptiness of the racing flats. It is this emptiness that Stubbs paints so well, as if his true subject went far beyond being mere sporting painting, and was rather the island atmosphere itself, the softness of the air and the watery English light.
