
George Stubbs Painting Reproductions Gallery 2 of 6
1724-1806English Romantic Painter
George Stubbs (born in Liverpool on August 25, 1724 - died in London July 10, 1806) was a British painter, best known for his paintings of horses.
Stubbs was the son of a currier. Information on his life up to age thirty-five is sparse, relying almost entirely on notes made by fellow artist Ozias Humphry towards the end of Stubbs's life. Stubbs was briefly apprenticed to a Lancashire painter and engraver named Hamlet Winstanley, but soon left as he objected to the work of copying to which he was set. Thereafter as an artist he was self-taught. In the 1740s he worked as a portrait painter in the North of England and from about 1745 to 1751 he studied human anatomy at York County Hospital. He had had a passion for anatomy from his childhood, and one of his earliest surviving works is a set of illustrations for a textbook on midwifery which was published in 1751.
In 1755 Stubbs visited Italy. Forty years later he told Ozias Humphry that his motive for going to Italy was, "to convince himself that nature was and is always superior to art whether Greek or Roman, and having renewed this conviction he immediately resolved upon returning home". Later in the 1750s he rented a farmhouse in Lincolnshire and spent 18 months dissecting horses. He moved to London in about 1759 and in 1766 published The anatomy of the Horse. The original drawings are now in the collection of the Royal Academy.
Even before his book was published, Stubbs's drawings were seen by leading aristocratic patrons, who recognised that his work was more accurate than that of earlier horse painters such as James Seymour and John Wootton. In 1759 the 3rd Duke of Richmond commissioned three large pictures from him, and his career was soon secure. By 1763 he had produced works for several more dukes and other lords and was able to buy a house in Marylebone, a fashionable part of London, where he lived for the rest of his life.
His most famous work is probably Whistlejacket, a painting of a prancing horse commissioned by the 3rd Marquess of Rockingham, which is now in the National Gallery in London. This and two other paintings carried out for Rockingham break with convention in having plain backgrounds. Throughout the 1760s he produced a wide range of individual and group portraits of horses, sometimes accompanied by hounds. He often painted horses with their grooms, whom he always painted as individuals. Meanwhile he also continued to accept commissions for portraits of people, including some group portraits. From 1761 to 1776 he exhibited at the Society of Artists, but in 1775 he switched his allegiance to the recently founded but already more prestigious Royal Academy.
Stubbs also painted more exotic animals animals including lions, tigers, giraffes, monkeys, and rhinoceroses, which he was able to observe in private menageries. He became preoccupied with the theme of a wild horse threatened by a lion and produced several variations on this theme. These and other works became well known at the time through engravings of Stubbs's work, which appeared in increasing numbers in the 1770s and 1780s.
Stubbs also painted historical pictures, but these are much less well regarded. From the late 1760s he produced some work on enamel. In the 1770s Josiah Wedgwood developed a new and larger type of enamel panel at Stubbs's request. Also in the 1770s he painted single portraits of dogs for the first time, while also receiving an increasing number of commissions to paint hunts with their packs of hounds. He remained active into his old age. In the 1780s he produced a pastoral series called Haymakers and Reapers, and in the early 1790s he enjoyed the patronage of the Prince of Wales, whom he painted on horseback in 1791. His last project, begun in 1795, was A comparative anatomical exposition of the structure of the human body with that of a tiger and a common fowl, engravings from which appeared between 1804 and 1806.
Stubbs's son George Townly Stubbs was an engraver and printmaker.
122 Paintings of George Stubbs
Private Collection
A Liver and White King Charles Spaniel in a ...
$493
$52.63
Yale Center for British Art Connecticut USA
Bulls Fighting
$560
$53.72
Private Collection
Portrait of a Monkey
$490
$52.14
Private Collection
Mares and Foals Beneath Large Oak Trees
$755
$47.90
Private Collection
Mares and Foals without a Background
$733
$47.90
Private Collection
'Gimcrack'
$550
$47.90
Yale Center for British Art Connecticut USA
A Phaeton with a Pair of Cream Ponies in the ...
$560
$47.90
Yale Center for British Art Connecticut USA
A Water Spaniel
$518
$54.91
Private Collection
A Grey and a Bay in a Landscape
$601
$60.34
Indianapolis Museum of Art Indiana USA
Rufus (Pangloss)
$552
$51.78
Private Collection
Mares and Foals Disturbed by an Approaching Storm
$824
$47.90
Yale Center for British Art Connecticut USA
A Zebra
$682
$57.82
Private Collection
A Horse Belonging to the Rt. Honourable Lord ...
$701
Private Collection
Five Brood Mares
$759
$47.90
Yale Center for British Art Connecticut USA
Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon's Gamekeeper with ...
$619
$58.08
Private Collection
Tristram Shandy, a Bay Racehorse Held by a Groom ...
$677
$49.94
Yale Center for British Art Connecticut USA
The Farmer's Wife and the Raven
$602
$49.63
Yale Center for British Art Connecticut USA
Brown and White Norfolk or Water Spaniel
$733
$60.72
Philadelphia Museum of Art Pennsylvania USA
Hound Coursing a Stag
$626
$57.82
Yale Center for British Art Connecticut USA
A Horse Affrighted by a Lion
$43.91
Private Collection
Two Hunters out at Grass
$578
$47.90
Private Collection
The Duke of Marlborough's Bay Hunter, with a ...
$653
$49.33
Private Collection
Fanny, the Favourite Spaniel of Mrs. Musters, ...
$387
$52.88
Private Collection
Fanny, a Brown and White Spaniel
$508