George Stubbs (1724–1806) is one of the most condescended to painters of all time. But this memorial exhibition of Stubbs’s work from the collection of his most ardent collector shows that the condescension is not warranted. Stubbs was not a great painter. But he was an exceedingly interesting, and often quietly witty, one.

Stubbs is, of course, most famous for his pictures of horses. He was the son of a currier, and horses were so to speak in his blood. He delineated them with a care and lovingness that other painters have reserved for beautiful women. Indeed, there is a sense in which the best of Stubbs’s paintings of horses may be considered portraits. That is to say, he did not paint horses in general: he painted them as creatures with distinct personalities. That is one reason that from the late 1750s, Stubbs was so much in demand among well-heeled sportsmen.

Stubbs’s pictures of horses that include human beings—Pumpkin with a Stable Lad (1774), for example—can be slightly disconcerting precisely because the beast emerges with far more spark and individuality than the man. People in Stubbs’s animal pictures are rarely more than stage props. Lemuel Gulliver would have found Stubbs to be the ideal artist to accompany him to the country of the Houyhnhnms. Stubbs did not share Gulliver’s misanthropy, but he would have understood his respect for horses.

Paul Mellon began buying pictures by Stubbs in 1936. By the time he died earlier this year at the age of ninety-one, he had assembled the greatest collection of the artist’s work anywhere. Mr. Mellon’s interest in Stubbs rescued Stubbs from his status as a slightly comic footnote to eighteenth-century English art.

Stubbs was self-taught, and it shows. His art is parochial and idiosyncratic. He commanded considerable technical skill, but he never really mastered the knack of enlivening the whole surface of his paintings or drawings. Memorable though it often is, his art rarely transcends illustration. The subject—be it a horse, a dog, a zebra—gets all of the attention, while the rest of picture is mere background. Stubbs painted a whole series depicting a lion attacking a horse.

Stubbs took extraordinary, almost grotesque, pains to master equine anatomy. As one commentator notes, he “devised a tackle for hauling a horse into lifelike attitudes, after which he proceeded to strip away layer after layer of skin and muscle to the skeleton, making drawings and notes at every stage.” Stubbs’s only helper in this grisly business was Mary Spencer, his common law wife, who must have been powerfully devoted to her husband to participate in these exercises in flaying.

Stubbs’s obsession with anatomy was not confined to horses. In 1795, when he was over seventy, he embarked on an ambitious serious of drawings called “A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl.” Although it was unfinished at his death in 1806, Stubbs did complete over a hundred drawings for the cycle, more than a dozen of which are on view at Yale. They are ferociously exact without quite being clinical. George Stubbs certainly doesn’t represent the pinnacle of Western art, but neither does he occupy those nether regions that so many museums have made unpleasantly familiar to us lately.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 18 Number 1, on page 52
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https://newcriterion.com/issues/1999/9/stubbs-kimball-2826

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