STUBBS, George

The horse is rendered in a masterly way in this painting.

Toward the end of his life, Stubbs embarked on a more ambitious work, a comparative anatomical study of a man, a tiger, and a fowl. The picture shows a plate from A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body, with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl.

The painting is signed and dated lower right: Geo: Stubbs / pinxit 1776.

Dog portraiture began in France at the court of Louis XV, who commissioned portraits of his favourite hounds hunting scenes of Frans Snyders. In England, where the emphasis in hunting was increasingly being placed upon the performance of individual hounds, which led to intense rivalry among the landed elite, this was reflected in the paintings of John Wootton and Peter Tillemans; the former of whom in particular started to produce portraits of dogs in the mid eighteenth century. Fine examples of Wootton’s work in this manner include the mock heroic portrait of Horace Walpole’s favourite dog Patapan, painted in 1743. However, it was Stubbs, a generation later, who really developed the genre, working, as he was, at a time when dogs were becoming increasingly valued not only as sporting trophies, but as objects of interest in themselves. By the late eighteenth century, the dog had gained a new status as a prized possession within English households which it had not formerly enjoyed. Stubbs’s highly sensitive paintings of these animals are executed with infinite attention to detail and are possessed with boundless character and charm. Whilst they are seldom uninteresting as paintings, at their best they are small masterpieces.

The young George Stubbs made a journey to Rome in 1754. He was already known as a painter of animals, and his earliest biographer recorded his failure to make the usual studies of classical monuments. But the suggestive power of one antiquity in particular, a pre-Hellenistic sculpture of a horse attacked by a lion in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, moved him to his own depiction of fear. For thirty years Stubbs meditated on this theme of conflict, producing at least seventeen works in oil or enamel, clay or mixed-method engraving, adopting an episodic, four-part sequence beginning with the horse’s first terrified sight of the lion emerging from its cave and ending - closest to the Antique source - with its exhausted collapse beneath its attacker. The picture shows this last episode.

Toward the end of his life, Stubbs embarked on a more ambitious work, a comparative anatomical study of a man, a tiger, and a fowl. The picture shows a plate from A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body, with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl.

From the mid-1770s onwards, dog portraiture became one of the principal and most sought after aspects of Stubbs’s art. The present composition is almost frieze-like and recalls the artist’s celebrated work in enamel which he had been actively experimenting with in collaboration with Josiah Wedgwood since the late 1760s. The effect is to accentuate the solidity and three-dimensionality of the dog itself, projecting him out of the picture towards the viewer.

Stubbs was born in Liverpool, the son of a leatherseller, and it is tempting to imagine that it was among the tack and harness in his father’s shop that he first came into contact with that English world of hunting, racing and horse breeding of which he became the quintessential interpreter. It was a world in which dukes metaphorically rubbed shoulders with stable lads, great landowners with Smithfield meat salesmen, society ladies with Newmarket jockeys, and men and women of all degrees with horses and dogs. ‘Master of the art of class distinction’, as the art historian Judy Egerton has remarked, he neither flattered nor mocked, but painted with profound ‘acceptance of things more or less as they are’. In the words of Mary Spencer, his common-law wife for some fifty years, ‘every object in the picture was a Portrait’.

In his effort to paint people truthfully Stubbs studied anatomy at a medical school. The better to portray horses he dissected them, teaching himself engraving to publish The Anatomy of the Horse. Although he may have wished to establish himself as a ‘history painter’ in the academic mould, he seems to have retained from his trip to Rome in 1754-6 only the memory of an antique marble of a lion attacking a horse. This subject preoccupied him for over thirty years and is the one theme in his work that comes nearest to evoking the ‘pity and terror’ of epic narrative. Stubbs’s gifts of invention had to do not with story-telling but with abstract design.

The poetic effect of Stubbs’s combination of dispassionate observation with pattern-making is beautifully demonstrated in this small full-length group portrait of - from left to right - the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Milbanke, her father Sir Ralph Milbanke, her brother John Milbanke, and her husband Sir Peniston Lamb, the future Viscount Melbourne. Although this kind of picture, popular in England in the eighteenth century, was called a ‘conversation piece’, the human sitters here converse no more than do the light tim-whisky carriage, the horses or Sir Peniston’s spaniel. This failing must be the result of Stubbs having studied each figure-group separately from the others, and from a different angle. We may be meant to imagine that the grander Milbankes are welcoming the ineffectual parvenu Sir Peniston. (His promotion to a viscountcy in 1784 was a result of his wife’s affair with the Prince of Wales.)

Complete in itself, each vignette - as precise in its delineation of character as it is accurate about costume, complexion, coat, harness, or curvature of wheels seen in perspective - is carefully placed alongside the others to suggest a gracefully meandering yet uninflected line across the painting, along which each person and animal is given equal stress. The frieze is contained within the canvas, turning inwards at the edges. Stubbs often added an imaginary landscape backdrop only after he had satisfactorily deployed his figures, and certainly this is what he must have done here, arranging masses of foliage and cliff, voids of sky, contrapuntally to the figural melody. And that ‘vital but endlessly silent’ communication among them (in David Piper’s beautiful phrase) is forged in the shapes and tones of the spaces around them, the rhythms created by the curving necks and croups of horses, the legs of men and beasts, the sharp accents of tricorn hats, of rose, blue, buff, bay, grey.

The composition of two horses communing face to face seems to have increasingly interested Stubbs in the late 1780s and early 1790s. The tranquil and serenely bucolic setting – a paddock in spring, with clumps of burdock in the foreground, a low paling fence curving round to a thatched shelter and distant hills beyond – is equally typical of Stubbs’s preferred setting for his portraits of horses in the latter part of his career: the mood reflective and calm, the emphasis being on the noble dignity of the animals themselves.

The great growth of interest in the natural sciences in the latter part of the eighteenth century stimulated the production of pictorial publications. Illustration often played a central part in such works, particularly since these sciences were at a stage when direct observation could lead to new discoveries. As well as being commissioned to make illustrations, there were many artists who were themselves amateur naturalists and who used their observational skills to publish scientific studies of great visual beauty. Many of these have remained unsurpassed on a scientific as well as an aesthetic level. The work of the great English animal painter Stubbs is an example of this. His Anatomy of the Horse remains the standard work of the subject.

Signed and dated lower centre: Geo: Stubbs p:/1793

There are eighteen paintings by Stubbs in the Royal Collection, all of which were almost certainly commissioned by George IV, or else acquired by him. Seventeen of these date from the early 1790s when Stubbs seems to have been particularly busy on behalf of his royal patron, to the extent that many of his pictures are recorded as being in store at Carlton House. A bill dated 14 February 1793 for frames made by Thomas Allwood reads: ‘To Carving & Gilding eight Picture frames of half length size for sundry Pictures painted by Mr Stubbs. all of one pattern.’ This is endorsed by Stubbs and the amount charged was ^110 l6s. 0d. The frame around the present picture is one of those made by Allwood.

William Anderson began as helper and hack-groom to George IV, when Prince of Wales, from 1788 to 1800, but he was appointed head groom in 1804 and finally Groom of the Stables in 1812. He wears royal livery - a scarlet coat with blue hat, collar and cuffs. The real subject of the painting, however, is not so much Anderson as the two chestnut horses of which George IV was particularly fond. A letter of 15 April 1790 from the Prince of Wales to his sporting companion, Sir John Lade, states: ‘I have driven every day of late the chestnut horses wh. go better than any horses I have belonging to me.’ The prince himself is shown riding a chestnut horse in a portrait by Stubbs, painted two years before the present painting (Royal Collection).

William Anderson with two Saddle-horses is a painting of outstanding quality. The composition is deceptively simple with the overlapping flanks of the two horses, silhouetted against the sky, fused in a memorable pattern. The emphasis throughout is on the horizontal and the only firm vertical is Anderson himself, rigid in the saddle of the leading horse. The languorous rhythm of the horses in the foreground of the picture is offset by the large expanse of sky, which takes up as much as three-quarters of the canvas, and by the flat rolling landscape contained within the remaining quarter. Stubbs achieves a moving, almost poetic, balance within the picture which should not be seen simply as an exercise in design. The artist uses his knowledge of anatomy in the depiction of the horses and there is a surprising variety of observation in the treatment of the clouds, the glimpse of the sea on the left, the copse and the burdock plants in the right foreground. The sea suggests that Anderson is shown riding near Brighton, a resort which the Prince of Wales first visited in 1783 and where he leased property in 1780 that was by degrees enlarged, originally by Henry Holland and then John Nash, to become the Royal Pavilion. The town became highly fashionable and had the added advantage of having a racecourse. In 1807-8 a stable block was added to the Pavilion with room for fifty-four horses. Domestic accounts record that Anderson was billetted in Brighton for twelve days in 1793 in addition to his work at Windsor. The second horse in the painting has presumably been saddled for the Prince of Wales.