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

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