Gallery-goers interested in viewing the handful of paintings by George Stubbs (1724–1806) on loan from the Yale Center for British Art will have to engage in the museological equivalent of hunting and pecking. The eight canvases are snuggled almost imperceptibly within the Met’s collection of European painting and are surrounded by those of his countrymen, including Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Gainsborough, and, in a disappointingly sanguine mood, William Hogarth. As the Yale Center’s Louis I. Kahn building undergoes restoration, New Yorkers have been offered a sampling of an artist best known for paintings of horses. Given how large exhibitions can tax one’s attention, who’s to say the less-is-more approach is a bad thing? The encompassing overview of John Singer Sargent’s portraits, concurrently...
 
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