A choice of art books

First, and by no means simply by virtue of its weight, is Judy Egerton’s George Stubbs, Painter: Catalogue Raisonné (Yale, £95), which effortlessly combines awesome scholarly authority with what in academic circles is, alas, a far rarer commodity — wit. Seen whole and supported by such eloquent advocacy, Stubbs emerges as a truly great artist, who has been held back by his Britishness and his subject matter. As Judy Egerton rightly observes, it was the subject of the Fitzwilliam’s ‘Gimcrack’ — a racehorse with jockey up — ‘whose seeming triviality had long caused more nervous art historians to twitch their petticoats’.

Another home-grown talent even more grievously in need of rescue is the hero of Nicholas Tromans’s David Wilkie: The People’s Painter (Edinburgh UP, £60). As the author explains, Wilkie — whose burial at sea was the subject of Turner’s ‘Peace’ — was ‘the most famous of all British artists during the first half of the 19th century’, but he has long since fallen from grace.