1724–1806
A currier's son from Liverpool who spent eighteen months in a remote Lincolnshire farmhouse dissecting horses, layer by layer, so that he could draw them properly. The book that came out of it, The Anatomy of the Horse, is still in print. The paintings that came out of it are the best horses anyone has made.
The Yale Center for British Art holds the largest group of Stubbs outside Britain. The five below include the first zebra shown in Britain, the first of his sixteen lion-and-horse paintings, and the first picture Paul Mellon ever bought.
George Stubbs was born in Liverpool on 25 August 1724, the son of a leather-worker, and taught himself to paint. In 1756 he rented a farmhouse at Horkstow in Lincolnshire and, with Mary Spencer as his assistant, spent a year and a half dissecting horses — hanging each carcass from the beams, stripping it back layer by layer, drawing every stage. No engraver would take the plates, so he cut them himself. The Anatomy of the Horse appeared in 1766.
By then he was in London, at 24 Somerset Street off Portman Square, where he lived until his death. The racing aristocracy — Rockingham, Grosvenor, Richmond — queued for his horses, and he painted them with an exactness that was also, somehow, tender. In the 1770s he worked with Josiah Wedgwood on painting in enamel on earthenware plaques; Wedgwood fired larger and larger panels at his request, and the venture left Stubbs in debt.
He died in London on 10 July 1806, at eighty-one, still working. The original Anatomy drawings are at the Royal Academy.
She arrived in London in 1762, a wedding present to Queen Charlotte, and was kept in a paddock beside Buckingham House where anyone could come and look. A broadsheet song about her went round the city. Stubbs painted her from life, every stripe counted, standing in an English wood as if she had always been there — a female Cape mountain zebra, the first of her kind shown in Britain.
He seems to have kept the picture himself. It was still in his studio when his effects were sold in 1807.
Nearly eleven feet wide, and the first of sixteen pictures Stubbs painted on this one subject. The story put about after his death was that he had watched a lion bring down a horse in North Africa. He had not. The source was an antique marble, Lion Seizing a Horse, which he saw in Rome in 1754 — a sculpture he turned into the most violent painting in English art.
Its companion, A Lion Attacking a Stag, hangs beside it at Yale, the same size to the inch.
The same canvas size as the horse, the next accession number in the Mellon collection, and the same subject turned on a different animal: the stag goes down under the lion's weight in a landscape that has gone dark around them. Stubbs painted stags with the same anatomical certainty he brought to horses, and here the terror is in the legs.
On 4 April 1766 a bay colt called Turf, by Matchem, beat King Herod in a thousand-guinea match over the Beacon Course at Newmarket. This is almost certainly the picture commissioned to mark it: the horse standing square, the jockey up in his owner's colours, the rubbing-house behind, the heath running off flat to the sky. Turf went lame about a year later and was retired.
A chestnut racehorse and the boy who looks after him, painted in beeswax and oil on a wooden panel — one of the experiments in medium that came out of Stubbs's work with Wedgwood. The horse is Pumpkin, the lad is unnamed, and the thing between them is the subject.
This was the very first painting Paul Mellon bought, long before the collection that became the Yale Center for British Art. It is where all of this began.
Buy English Art opens in 2027 with open-edition prints of the paintings on this site. One email when it does, and a story about a painting now and then. No offers, no noise.