PAINTINGS

Broad Street Review

A LOOK BACK

By Richard Carreño

[October 17, 2014]

There's no lack of works by George Stubbs (1724-1806), the gifted 18th-century English animal and sporting painter, in museums around the world, particularly those in the United States and in Great Britain. In London and elsewhere, we see Stubbs as he almost single-handedly launched the figurative animal genre, in portraits and in landscapes that burst with the kind of real-life energy that invested many of the greenswards of country homes and stables shaped by Capability Brown's capable hand.

Aristocratic horsemen and their grooms and jockeys often populate these scenes, but it's always the horse we care about most. Even in paintings in which horses don't figure, the setting is always sufficiently pastoral that, at any given moment, the viewer almost expects a foal or two to trot onto the canvas. Stubbs's marvelous dog pictures can stand alone, but they also summon up a country life wherein a mounted gentleman would never be out of place.

To completely understand Stubbs, then, requires focusing on Stubbs’s best work, as an equine genre painter. Be it in the stable yard, at the track, or on the hunt course, Stubbs's greatness is seen in those paintings, in which he pioneered realism, undergirding the skins of his animal subjects with anatomical accuracy. (How? For one thing, he actually dissected horses to discover their inner makeup.) In Stubbs’s world of realism, horses no longer looked like the stick figures of previous centuries, or the “primitive” representations that American Indians were then painting on buffalo hides in the New World. Stubbs’s horses moved their legs with an accuracy that was confirmed only later when photography came into its own a century on.

One might disagree about which painting best represents Stubbs at his peak.

STUBBS MERCH @ NATIONAL GALLERY LONDON

Your recognition of our work is kindly accepted! Please do what you can by sending donations in any amount Philabooks@yahoo.com via Venmo.

George Stubbs (1724-1806)

WHISTLEJACKET (Circa 1762)

George Stubbs George Stubbs ARA (25 August 1724 – 10 July 1806) was an English painter, best known for his paintings of horses. Self-trained, Stubbs learnt his skills independently from other great artists of the eighteenth century such as Reynolds or Gainsborough. Stubbs' output includes history paintings, but his greatest skill was in painting animals, perhaps influenced by his love and study of anatomy. 

His series of painting on the theme of a lion attacking a horse are early and significant examples of the Romantic movement that emerged in the late 18th century. His painting, Whistlejacket, hangs in the National Gallery, London. Biography A lion attacking a horse Legacy Gallery Horses Dogs Exotic wildlife List of selected artworks See also References Further reading External links Stubbs was born in Liverpool, the son of a currier, or leather-dresser, John Stubbs, and his wife Mary.[1] Information on his life until the age of 35 or so is sparse, relying almost entirely on notes made by Ozias Humphry, a fellow artist and friend; Humphry's informal memoir, which was not intended for publication, was based on a series of private conversations he had with Stubbs around 1794, when Stubbs was 70 years old, and Humphry 52.[1]

Stubbs worked at his father's trade until the age of 15 or 16, at which point he told his father that he wished to become a painter.[2][3] While initially resistant, Stubbs's father (who died not long after in 1741), eventually acquiesced in his son's choice of a career path, on the condition that he could find an appropriate mentor.[3] Stubbs subsequently approached the Lancashire painter and engraver Hamlet Contents Biography 9/30/21, 2:32 PM George Stubbs - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stubbs 2/16 The Milbanke and Melbourne Families (ca. 1769), oil on canvas, 97 x 149 cm., National Gallery Whistlejacket (ca. 1762), oil on canvas, 292 x 246.4 cm., National Gallery Winstanley, and was briefly engaged by him in a sort of apprenticeship relationship, probably not more than several weeks in duration.[4]