Background
Stubbs was born in Liverpool, United Kingdom, on August 25, 1724. He was the son of John Stubbs, a currier, and his wife, Mary.
1780
In 1780 Stubbs became an associate of the Royal Academy of Arts.
In 1780 Stubbs became an associate of the Royal Academy of Arts.
(In this systematic study, Stubbs depicts the horse in thr...)
In this systematic study, Stubbs depicts the horse in three positions - side, front, and back. He first presents the skeleton alone in each of these three positions, then devotes to each position five studies of layers of muscles, fascias, ligaments, nerves, arteries, veins, glands, and cartilages.
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1766
(Anterior View, from 'A Comparative Anatomical Exposition ...)
Anterior View, from 'A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl'
(Study No. 10 from 'The Anatomy of the Horse'.)
Study No. 10 from 'The Anatomy of the Horse'.
(Lateral View, with skin and underlying fascial layers rem...)
Lateral View, with skin and underlying fascial layers removed, from 'A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl'.
Stubbs was born in Liverpool, United Kingdom, on August 25, 1724. He was the son of John Stubbs, a currier, and his wife, Mary.
Brought up to his father's business, George Stubbs was about eight years when he began to study anatomy at his father's house in Ormond Street, Liverpool. His neighbour, Dr. Holt, lent him bones and prepared subjects to draw. When Stubbs was fifteen, his father gave way to his son's desire to be a painter.
Stubbs was apprenticed to Hamlet Winstanley, a former friend of Arthur Devis. George Stubbs assisted Hamlet Winstanley in copying pictures at Knowsley Hall, the seat of the Earl of Derby. He was to receive instruction, a shilling a day, and the choice of pictures to copy. However, Hamlet Winstanley afterwards refused to let him copy the pictures he chose, and they quarrelled, Stubbs declared that "henceforward he would look into nature for himself, and consult and copy her only." So, Stubbs left Winstanley after only a few weeks.
Apparently self-taught, George Stubbs practised as a portrait painter in various northern centres. Obsessed with anatomy, he studied it at New York Hospital.
Stubbs lived with his mother at Liverpool till he was twenty. He then moved to Wigan and stayed about eight months with Captain Blackbourne, who took a great fancy to him from his likeness to a son whom he had lost. He then moved to Leeds and then to York, where he gave lectures upon anatomy to the students at York County Hospital. His earliest surviving artworks are 18 plates etched for Dr. John Burton’s "Essay Towards a Complete New System of Midwifery" in 1751, which was published only in 1756.
From York George Stubbs moved to Hull, and after a short visit to Liverpool set sail for Italy in 1754, in order "to convince himself that nature was and is always superior to art whether Greek or Roman, and having renewed this conviction he immediately resolved upon returning home." He went by sea to Leghorn, and thence to Rome. He made many sketches from nature and life.
While in Italy he befriended an educated Moor, who took him to his father's house at Ceuta, from the walls of which he witnessed a lion stalk and seize a white Barbary horse about two hundred yards from the ditch. This incident influenced many of his pictures.
After his return, Stubbs settled at Liverpool for a while. He came to London in 1756, visiting Lincolnshire on the way to paint portraits for Lady Nelthorpe. In 1758 he rented a farmhouse near Barton, Lincolnshire, where he spent 18 months dissecting horses and preparing for his great work on the "Anatomy of the Horse." He installed a device by which he could hang the body of a dead horse and move the limbs to any position, as if in motion. He laid bare each layer of muscles one after the other until the skeleton was reached, and produced complete and careful drawings of all. He required a lot of horses before he had finished, and he did the whole work at his own expense and without any assistance.
At first, he intended to find engravers to produce drawings for him, but he could not persuade any of them to take up the work, and so decided to execute all the plates by himself. This employed his mornings and nights for six or seven years. "The Anatomy of the Horse" was published in 1766 by J. Purser, and was a great success. It was the first work to define clearly the structural form of the horse.
George Stubbs's reputation as a painter of horses had greatly increased. In 1760 he was at Eaton Hall, painting for Lord Grosvenor. Shortly afterwards Stubbs went to Goodwood, receiving a commission from the Duke of Richmond to paint three large pictures from him. He stayed at Goodwood for nine months, during which time he executed a large hunting-piece, 9 feet by 6 feet, as well as many portraits. In 1760 he became a treasurer of the Society of Artists of Great Britain, later being its president (for one year) in 1773. He was a frequent contributor to the society's exhibitions from 1762 to 1774.
By 1763 he had produced works for several more dukes and other lords and was able to buy a house in Marylebone, a fashionable part of London, where he lived for the rest of his life. Besides his numerous portraits of horses, dogs, and other animals, Stubbs also exhibited two pictures of "Phaeton (1762 and 1764), "Hercules and Achelous" (1770), "Horse and Lion" (1763), "A Lion seizing a Horse" (1764), "A Lion and Stag" (1766), "A Lion devouring a Stag" (1767), "A Lion devouring a Horse" (1770), and several others of lions, lionesses, and tigers.
In 1771, at the suggestion of his friend Richard Cosway, the miniature-painter, he started to make experiments in enamel. His first enamels were on copper, one of which was "A Lion devouring a Horse." Also in the 1770s, he painted single portraits of dogs for the first time, while also receiving commissions to paint hunts with their packs of hounds.
In 1775 George Stubbs switched his allegiance to the recently founded but already more prestigious Royal Academy, where he started to exhibit his works. He remained active into his old age. The contributions of his later years included "Reapers" and "Haymakers" (1786), a pair of genre pictures well known from his own engravings.
After 1791, in which year he exhibited a portrait of the Prince of Wales, his patron, and three other artworks, he did not contribute to the Royal Academy till 1799. His last project, started in 1795, was "A comparative anatomical exposition of the structure of the human body with that of a tiger and a common fowl", fifteen engravings which appeared between 1804 and 1806. The project was left unfinished. The artist continued to exhibit till 1803, and in 1800 he presented the largest of all his pictures, "Hambletonian beating Diamond at Newmarket".
George Stubbs was one of the first painters who thoroughly mastered their anatomy. He drew them with a lifelike accuracy of form and movement that has never been exceeded.
As an animal-painter Stubbs's reputation was deservedly great, not only with the owners of the horses whose portraits he painted but also with the public. Early clients for his paintings included many of the noblemen.
The record price for a Stubbs painting was set by the sale at auction of Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Stable-Lad, and a Jockey (1765) at Christie's in London in July 2011 for £22.4 million. It was sold by the British Woolavington Collection of sporting art.
Today, his works are held in the collections of the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, among others.
(In this systematic study, Stubbs depicts the horse in thr...)
1766Study of a Fowl
(Lateral View, with skin and underlying fascial layers rem...)
Study of the Human Figure
(Anterior View, from 'A Comparative Anatomical Exposition ...)
Frontal view of the skeleton of a horse
(Study No. 10 from 'The Anatomy of the Horse'.)
Cattle by a Stream
Portrait of Richard Wedgewood
A Foxhound, Ringwod
Pumpkin with a Stable Lad
Sleeping Leopard
John and Sophia Musters riding at Colwick Hall
Cheetah with two Indian servants and a deer
William Anderson with two saddle-horses
Laetitia, Lady Lade
Mares and Foals in a River Landscape
Eclipse
Harvest
Messenger Horse
Horse Attacked by a Lion
Portrait of John Nelthorpe as a child
Self-Portrait
Josiah Wedgwood
Mares and Foals in a Wooded Landscape
The Moose
Red Deer Stag and Hind
Hay Makers
Mares and Foals under an Oak Tree
Diagram from The Anatomy of the Horse
Zebra
Lord and Lady in a Phaeton
Prince of Wales Phaeton
Portrait of Isabella Saltonstall
Earl Grosvenor's Bandy
Hound and Bitch in a Landscape
Baronet
Horse Attacked by a Lion
Two Bay Mares And a Grey Pony In a Landscape
A Water Spaniel
Portrait of a Huntsman
Park Phaeton with a Pair of Cream Pontes in Charge of a Stable Lad with a Dog
A Grey Stallion In A Landscape
Pavian and Albino Makake
Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon's Gamekeeper, With a Dying Doe and Hound
A Chestnut Racehorse
Whistlejacket
Snap With Trainer
Colonel Pocklington with His Sisters
Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Stable lad, and a Jockey
Mares and foals are anxious before a looming storm
Melbourne and Milbanke Families
Horse Devoured by a Lion
Spanish Pointer
Lord Grosvenor's Arabian Stallion with a Groom
A Saddled Bay Hunter
Diomed
Brown and White Norfolk or Water Spaniel
Soldiers of the 10th Dragoon Regiment
Lady Reading in a Wooded Park
Five Brood Mares
Racehorses Belonging to the Duke of Richmond Exercising at Goodwood
Lion Attacking a Horse
Portrait of a Monkey
Brood Mares and Foals
Viscount Gormanston's White Dog
A Bay Hunter With Two Spaniels
Godolphin Arabian
The Hunters leave Southill
A Horse Frightened by a Lion
The Grosvenor Hunt
A Grey Horse
Hambletonian
Sir John Nelthorpe, 6th Baronet out Shooting with his Dogs in Barton Field, Lincolnshire
Mares and Foals in a Mountainous Landscape
Marske Horse
Self-Portrait
Stubbs joined the Society of Artists of Great Britain in 1760. In 1780 he became an associate of the Royal Academy of Arts. The following year he was elected to full honours, but he refused to submit a Diploma painting. So, his election was annulled in a very arbitrary manner, and another painter was elected in his place.
George Stubbs always claimed that he was entitled to the rank of R.A., but after 1782 he appears in the catalogues as an associate only, except in 1803, when, probably by chance, the initials R.A. are placed after his name.
George Stubbs was known to be a man of extraordinary energy, diligence, and self-sufficiency. He had considerable and various talents.
Physical Characteristics: Stubbs's bodily strength was really great. It is proved by the fact that he carried the whole carcass of a horse on his shoulders up three flights of a narrow staircase to his dissecting room.
George Stubbs was a romantic affair with Mary Spencer. Stubbs had a son, George Townly Stubbs, who would become an engraver and printmaker.
