A Zebra, 1763 George Stubbs (1724-1806)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of George Stubbs also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting A Zebra is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A pale track opens in the forest like a small stage, and on it stands an animal that seems both completely real and slightly unreal. George Stubbs places the zebra in profile, head turned left, legs held with that cautious, spring-loaded poise familiar to anyone who has watched a nervous horse. Yet this is no horse. The stripes are a kind of living architecture, wrapping the body, tightening around the legs, widening across the rump, breaking into restless commas at the neck.

Painted in 1763, A Zebra records a female Cape mountain zebra brought from Africa to London the year before by a British warship and presented to Queen Charlotte. George Stubbs knew animals as few painters did. His looking is exact, not theatrical: the compact barrel of the body, the firm little hooves, the high dark mane, the lean muzzle softened by brownish shadow. Notice the ears. One pricks forward, the other seems to cant away, a tiny asymmetry that gives the creature an alert, unsettled intelligence.

Around her, however, Stubbs invents freely. This damp English-seeming woodland is not the open terrain of southern Africa, nor the royal enclosure where she lived. Tall trunks rise around her like columns, making the animal look unexpectedly small. That is one of the painting’s quiet surprises. Exotic possession becomes a vulnerable presence. One might imagine the cool smell of moss and wet bark, and the slight snap of a twig just beyond the trees.

Colour is handled with unusual tact. The forest is made from olives, umbers, smoky greens and patches of yellowed leaf, all held in a low, humid light. Against this, the zebra’s black and cream markings appear crisp without becoming decorative. Stubbs resists the easy dazzle. The white is not truly white; it is warmed with buff and grey, especially along the belly and flank. Beneath the animal, a few pale strokes on the ground catch the same light, anchoring her firmly rather than letting her float.

Compared with Stubbs’s great horse portraits, especially Whistlejacket, this picture is less about aristocratic force than about scrutiny and strangeness. The pose is formal, almost scientific, yet the setting has the hush of a fairy-tale clearing. That tension gives the painting its life. It is a document of eighteenth-century curiosity and imperial collecting, certainly, but also an encounter with an individual animal. She stands there, wary and self-contained, carrying her foreignness on her skin while the painted forest closes softly behind her.