“George Stubbs: A Celebration”
The Frick Collection, New York.
February 21, 2007-May 27, 2007
When George Stubbs arrived in London from the north, about 1759, he was already thirty-five and had been a practicing artist for at least fifteen years. But he was an unknown. What he carried with him, however, propelled him to almost instant recognition and fame. For the previous two years and secluded in a Lincolnshire hamlet, Stubbs had labored with incredible diligence and perseverance creating more than forty elaborately detailed anatomical drawings of horses. Engraved over the next seven years and published in 1766 as The Anatomy of the Horse, the work ranks as one of the great achievements of British art of the Enlightenment. Together with A Comparative Exposition of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl, begun when Stubbs was seventy-one, but never completed, the two hugely ambitious undertakings can be considered the book-ends of a prolific and remarkable career.
The Frick exhibition, marking the bi-centenary of the artist’s death, comprises a small selection drawn from considerably larger shows that have already been seen in Liverpool and London. The works included, however, do manage to represent admirably the main themes and phases of Stubbs’s long artistic journey.
Even casual visitors to “George Stubbs: A Celebration” will initially be struck by the uncanny consistency of style and execution that marks these eighteen paintings, executed over a span of almost forty years. That uniformity, more