GEORGE STUBBS’S DRAWINGS of the anatomy of the horse are marvels of concentration but also of sheer physical effort. Over a period of eighteen months from the summer of 1756, in a barn in the village of Horkstow in Lincolnshire, Stubbs bled a number of horses to death, hoisted them on a homemade contraption, progressively dissected them, making drawings at each stage. He then taught himself the art of engraving, and laboriously created each plate for his book The Anatomy of the Horse, published ten years later.
I went again to see the drawings at the library of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, last week. While there I also requested to see another book of anatomical images from the last decade of Stubbs’s life. A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl was published in parts and remained incomplete on the artist’s death in 1806.
The large volume contains a thirty or so engraved plates based on drawings of the anatomy of the animals named in the title — a chicken, a tiger, and a man. They are very strange images, not least because of the positions they are shown in: as skeletons, running and standing, and as equivalent in scale; the chicken as large as a man — or perhaps the man as small as the chicken.
Among the most captivating images are those of the tiger. Stubbs shows a diagram (image above) of the surface blood flow, labelling the veins like rivers on a map of the animal’s body. The foxing of the sheet makes it even more like a star chart or zodiacal diagram. Alongside is an engraved plate showing the creature with skin and tissue removed. It doesn’t look much like a tiger, and it has been suggested (by Terence Doherty, in his 1975 book on the subject) that Stubbs’s model was in fact a leopard.
The original drawings made by Stubbs for his comparative anatomy have very fortunately survived, and are kept at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. They are a fascinating insight into the mind of one of the greatest English artists, but also reveal the first glimmerings of new knowledge about the human and animal world. By showing humans and animals as equivalents, Stubbs anticipates Darwin by over fifty years.
In his drawings of the tiger (or leopard) Stubbs also provides an answer to the famous question asked by William Blake, only a few years earlier:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
— ‘The Tyger’, by William Blake, from Songs of Experience (1794)
He was pretty aware - and in fact names Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo as the ‘great anatomists’ in the text accompanying the Tiger-Chicken-Man book. The large collection of Leonardo’s drawings, including lots of anatomical sheets, at Windsor were rediscovered in the late 1700s - I’ve read that John Hunter, the great surgeon anatomist and Stubbs’s patron was the first to realise their scientific importance, but have not come across any direct evidence of this. It’s interesting to compare the two - both great anatomical artists, but where Leonardo sees everything through the lens of poetry, with Stubbs you never lose the feeling of n artist from Birmingham who was the son of a leatherworker. Lots more to say on this… perhaps a separate post. Thank you for the question.
I know that he has been compared to Leonardo da Vinci, whose working practices he seems to have shared, but how aware was he of da Vinci’s work?