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George
Stubbs belongs to the artists whose names are re-discovered in the 20th
century. At his time he was known only to a narrow circle of aristocratic
sportsmen and horse lovers, for his contemporaries he was a mere horse-painter.
A broadened critical view of the 20th century revealed the full extent
of his achievement, his innovations and exceptional originality and power.
His works are still mostly, with some exceptions, in private collections
in the houses for which they were executed. This, of course, restricts
the number of his admirers. But his reassessment has lifted him to the
level of the greatest of his time.
George Stubbs was born in 1724 in Liverpool, son of a currier and one of
five children. He had a minimum of formal instruction: in 1739 he was briefly
a pupil of the minor painter Hamlet Winstanley. This was apparently enough
to launch Stubbs off as a provincial portrait painter. As such he worked
(1743-53) in Wigan, Leeds, York and at Hull. When at York he already knew
enough anatomy to give private lessons to medical students at York Hospital
and this led to his commissions in 1751 to illustrate a book on midwifery
by Dr. John Burton. He learnt enough of etching from a local engraver to
etch the plates himself.
His interest in anatomy and its studies continued all his life and proved
to be important not only to his art but also a new contribution to science.
In 1766 his The Anatomy of the Horse
was published, which added to his prestige; he worked on a comparative
anatomy of a man, a tiger and common fowl until his death, it was left
incomplete.
At the age of 30, in 1754 he went to Italy by boat. He is said to have
gone with no enthusiasm for Italian art, but with a desire to confirm his
view that nature, not art, was the only source of inspiration and improvement.
On the return journey he made a stop in Marocco. It is believed that a
scene he saw there inspired his later picture Horse
Attacked by a Lion (1762-1765). In 1756, his son, George Townley
Stubbs (d.1815), was born by Mary Spencer who had become his common-law
wife. In 1759, the family moved to London.
In the 1760s-1770s, Stubbs lived in London. The nature of his commissions
required him to travel almost as much as a topographical watercolourist
of his day. A series of masterpieces mostly belonging to this decade was
that depicting horses and foals. Some of the horses named and were painted
for their owners, but others may have been prompted by Stubbs’s own liking
for variations on the theme Mares and Foals
in a Wooded Landscape (1760-1762), Racehorses
Belonging to the Duke of Richmond Exercising at Goodwood (1760-1761),
Mares
and Foals Disturbed by an Approaching Storm (1764-1766). As
portraits his horses were satisfying to his patrons: Whistlejacket
(1761-1762).
His powers, however, expanded in other directions. There was an easy transition
from the portraiture of mounted sportsmen to the open-air 'conversation'
picture without reference to hunting or racing. From the end of the 1760s
he produced magnificent examples of the genre The
Melbourne and Milbanke Families (1769-1770), John
and Sophia Musters Out Riding at Colwick Hall (1777).
A separate development beginning in the 1760s was Stubbs’s portrayal of
wild animals. A unique product of an imaginative kind was the horse and
lion series: Horse Attacked by a Lion
(1768-1772). He was commissioned to paint the first kangaroo brought to
England, for another client he painted a moose The
Moose (1770); there were commissions for an Indian rhinoceros,
a baboon with a macaque monkey, a yak, and other animals. An exceptional
commission was that commemorating the gift of a cheetah to George III by
the Governor of Madras, Sir George Pigot (later Lord Pigot) Cheetah
with Two Indian Attendants and a Stag (1764-1765).
In the 1770s, Stubbs embarked on new enterprises: he experimented with
enamel painting. He consulted Josiah Wedgwood about the possibility of
making large pottery plaques on which the enamel process could be used.
Josiah Wedgwood invited Stubbs to stay at his Etruria headquarters and
experiment. Stubbs lived with the famous potter in 1780, using the process
on pottery plaques in portraits of Wedgwood and his family, creating experimental
paintings on ceramics. In the great paintings that were still to come,
he reverted to oils, mostly on smooth panels rather than canvas.
An Associate of the Royal Academy in 1780, Stubbs was elected to full membership
in 1781. The self-portrait of that year, executed in enamel on an oval
Wedgwood plaque Self-Portrait
(1781), shows him at fifty-seven. The Academy did not look kindly to experiments
of the kind, most of its members holding to the conviction that painting
in oils was the proper exercise of professional skill, even watercolor
being grudgingly admitted to its exhibitions. A great development of this
decade was his rendering of rural life and work, especially in the two
oil paintings on panel, The Reapers (1784) and The
Haymakers (1785).
In 1790s the Prince
of Wales commissioned a painting of members of his favoured regiment,
which exercised Stubbs’s powers afresh. Soldiers
of the 10th Light Dragoons (1793). Other works to royal commission
included the portrait presumed to be of Laetitia,
Lady Lade (1793). The Prince’s commissions was further extended
by the herd of red deer he had acquired. Red
Deer Stag and Hind (1792). In all, the 18 paintings by Stubbs,
still preserved at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, show his powers
undiminished and indeed in some ways strengthened as he neared the age
of 70.
Stubbs died in 1806, July 10, in poor financial circumstances.
Bibliography:
Stubbs
& the Horse by Malcolm Warner, Robin Blake, Lance Mayer,
Gay Myers. Kimbell Art Museum, 2004.
The
Art of George Stubbs by Venetia Morrison. Wellfleet Press,
1990.
George
Stubbs by Martin Myrone. Tate, 2003.
George
Stubbs and the Wide Creation : Animals, people and places in the life of
George Stubbs, 1724-1806 by Robin Blake. Chatto & Windus,
2005.
Memoir
of George Stubbs by Ozias Humphry, Joseph Mayer. Pallas Athene,
2005.
George
Stubbs : The Complete Engraved Works by Christopher Lennox-Boyd,
Rob Dixon, Tim Clayton. Philip Wilson Publishers, 2004.