Word: stubbses
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Like all great artists, Stubbs was quite unsentimental, and his work reminds us what a recent invention the idea that "animals are only human" really is. His animals are always presented in the full "otherness" of their animal nature. He kept to this even when painting that traditional focus of...
Of course, there is pathos in Stubbs' hunting scenes. His portrait of the Earl of Clarendon's gamekeeper about to cut a doe's throat in a darkening wood is a gravely haunting mixture of the archaic and the matter-of-fact. Venison, to be eaten, must...
It was the now vanished tone of 18th century landed society-fenced about with deadly capital statutes, but also bound intimately together by chains of patronage running vertically through the classes-that enabled Stubbs to paint his admirably varied theater of land work, from haymakers to grooms, trainers and jockeys...
The horse was his chief image of social harmony: order on four legs. No wonder that, in such paintings as Eclipse at Newmarket, With a Groom and a Jockey, circa 1770, the plain rubbing-down houses on Newmarket Heath look like neo-Egyptian shrines, pyramids of the turf. They are...
Horses not only had ideal attributes in this scheme of things, they also made plausible heroes. The great example is Stubbs' prosaically titled Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, 1800. Hambletonian, winner of both the St. Leger and the Doncaster Gold Cup in 1796, belonged 3 to a rich and deep-gambling...