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| Whistlejacket, 1762, George Stubbs. (National Gallery, London) |
Stubbs himself related that he had placed the unfinished
painting against a stable wall when Whistlejacket saw it. Thinking he was
seeing another stallion rising to attack, the horse began “to stare and look
wildly at the picture, endeavouring to get at it, to fight and kick it,”
raising his handler off the ground. At that moment, Stubbs decided the painting
was done.
That’s a great story, but it glosses over the fact that oil
paintings are not usually developed as discrete subjects floating in empty
space. The medium isn’t amenable to this kind of treatment. Oil paintings are generally developed as
whole pieces, from the bottom layer up. Disregarding this requires the highest mastery
of drawing, because there is no way to hide pentimento
on a plain background.
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Mares and Foals Without a Background, 1762, George Stubbs
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Whistlejacket was one
of several equine portraits Stubbs painted in 1762 during a stay at Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire. He was
there on the invitation of Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquess
of Rockingham. A leading grandee of the Whig party, Rockingham had been
educated on the Continent. In short, he was a rarified British peer, separated
from the rest of us by money, education and breeding. According to his wife, his
primary interests were gambling and horses.
Stubbs painted at least three paintings without backgrounds
while at Wentworth Woodhouse. Mares and
Foals Without a Background and 'Whistlejacket'
and Two Other Stallions with Simon Cobb, the Groom are both arranged carefully
on long empty canvases. Whistlejacket
continues that formality, rising in a classical dressage air. Since Whistlejacket
himself was a notoriously temperamental racing stallion, the pose is almost
certainly a fiction.
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Pangloss (“Rufus”), c.
1762, George Stubbs. (Indianapolis Museum of Art)
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What strikes us as so modern about Stubbs’ horse silhouettes
was probably a nod to classicism on his part, homage to the architectural friezes
of Greece and Rome. This would have appealed to men of letters during the Age of Enlightenment. Stubbs went on to use the device in later animal
and human portraits.
George Stubbs was born in Liverpool in
1724, the son of a currier. He worked with his father until the latter’s death
in 1741, whereupon he was briefly apprenticed to a minor artist named Hamlet
Winstanley. From then on, he was self-taught.
Stubbs was fascinated by anatomy, both equine and human. He
spent six years studying anatomy at York County Hospital. Among his early works
is a set of illustrations for a text on midwifery, from 1751.
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Plate from The
Anatomy of the Horse, 1766, George
Stubbs.
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In 1756, Stubbs embarked on a quixotic quest for equal
knowledge about horse anatomy. Hanging a series of horse carcasses from the
rafters of a barn in the village of Horkstow, over the course of
18 months he flayed and sketched layer after layer of equine tissue.
Stubbs created a set of frontal, lateral, and posterior
views that would become the basis of his book, The Anatomy of the Horse: including a particular description of the
bones, cartilages, muscles, fascias, ligaments, nerves, arteries, veins, and
glands. This treatise was hailed as a groundbreaking work of artistic and
scientific merit and was the foundation of his future career.
Stubbs was curious about anatomy to the end. His last unfinished project, begun in 1795,
was A comparative anatomical
exposition of the structure of the human body with that of a tiger and a common
fowl. It was unfinished at the time of Stubbs’ death at the age of 81.
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