George Stubbs (1724–1806)

last updated 8 January 2015

George Stubbs understood horses from the inside out, said Simon Schama in The New Yorker. His father tanned and finished leather, and Stubbs began his artistic career with a gruesome study of equine anatomy. Holing up with his mistress in a rural house, 'œhe proceeded to bleed selected horses to death from the jugular. He then injected the cadavers with warm tallow to preserve the form of pulsing veins and arteries' visible through the horses' flesh. Stubbs captured that lively pulsing in his paintings, 17 of which are now gathered in a beguiling exhibition at the Frick Collection. They display both the skill that prompted England's richest squires to hire him to paint their steeds and the 'œfabulous weirdness' that lifts him above the average genre painter. For though Stubbs painted dogs, humans, and landscapes with equal skill, 'œhe has been known since his own day as a horse painter, the greatest ever.'

Except that he wasn't, said Lance Esplund in The New York Sun. There is no doubt Stubbs could capture the lustrous coat of a horse and articulate its musculature. But those are not the same thing as the horse itself. In works such as Molly Longlegs (1762) or A Horse Frightened by a Lion (1770), the animals seem mechanical and melodramatic, like a taxidermist's wares. 'œThere is no real sense of integration—of all the parts adding up to a living being.' Even Stubbs' best works here, such as Haymakers and Reapers (both 1785) are collections of virtuoso passages, not fully unified compositions. If you ask me, Rubens, GÃ©ricault, and Delacroix were all better painters of horses. In fact, the Frick has better horses in its own collection. Rembrandt's The Polish Rider, with its whirling beast and brooding landscape, offers 'œso much more than can be found in Stubbs' animals.'