A true portrait

In painting, as in music and literature, artists whose work in old age is comparable to that of their youth are rare beasts: Titian, who traditionally if implausibly lived to be 99, was one; Goya, who died aged 82, was another. But of neither can it be claimed that they saved their greatest work for last. George Stubbs, on the other hand, painted the finest picture of a long and fecund career, and quite possibly the greatest equine portrait in the whole of art, at the age of 75, six years before his death in 1806.

‘Hambletonian, Rubbing Down’, which hangs in Mount Stewart House in Northern Ireland, will not, however, feature in the forthcoming exhibition of his work that opens at the National Gallery at the end of June. It will leave a yawning hole because this image, more than any other, shows just how far the artist — for so long fondly if dismissively categorised as ‘Mr Stubbs the horse painter’ — transcended the genre of sporting art.