Master of the horse

George Stubbs (1724–1806) is best remembered as the dedicated anatomist of the horse, a man who would spend weeks alone in a room with a suspended equine carcass, gradually stripping away the muscles and recording what he learnt. Neither the stench nor the decomposition deterred him, for he was as resolute and methodical as a scientist in his pursuit of verifiable truth. In 1766 he published his findings in a beautiful book of 18 engravings, The Anatomy of the Horse, a substantial contribution to science (much consulted by vets and horse doctors), but intended primarily for the use of artists. For Stubbs was not just a superlative draughtsman (some of the drawings for the book are on view in the first room of this exhibition), he was also a painter of genius, a classicist gifted with a sense of pictorial design that is poetic in its sureness and economy.

Surprisingly, this exhibition is the first to focus exclusively on Stubbs’s passion for the horse, proof-positive that his reputation is now so firmly established that it cannot be diminished by the practice of what was traditionally thought of as a genre much lower than history painting or even portraiture.