Art review from today's New York Times about an exhibition of our man George Stubbs's work just opened up at the Frick Collection in New York:
Finding Art in Nature, and the Beauty in the Beast
By GRACE GLUECK
A small, appealing monkey of indeterminate ancestry, face turned to the viewer as it plucks a peach from a branch, occupies a prime spot in “George Stubbs (1724-1806): A Celebration” at the Frick Collection, an intimate show recognizing the bicentenary of Stubbs’s death. For those who still think of Stubbs as first and foremost a painter of horses, the prominent placement of the monkey painting is meant to signal that the artist was equally brilliant at capturing other mammals, including humans, as is soon made clear in the rest of this 17-painting exhibition.
Men and women gathering grain; an extraordinary ox; the Duke of Richmond’s prized bull moose; a landscape with a race course; foxhounds and other hunting dogs are among the nonhorse images on view.
But horses were Stubbs’s prime subject, and he earned fame with his still admired tour de force, “The Anatomy of the Horse” (1766), based on painstaking dissections of equine corpses from head to hoof. His studies enabled him to paint without cutesy anthropomorphism the elegant thoroughbreds belonging to aristocratic owners, like “Molly Longlegs” (1762), an anorexic-looking but powerful bay filly just retired from racing. He portrayed her, attended by her jockey, as he was readying his “Anatomy” for publication, and beneath her polished brown coat you can see eloquent evidence of her skeletal structure and the taut pull of her muscles.
In sharp contrast with the quiet rendering of Molly in a calm landscape is a painting Stubbs did the next year, “Horse Attacked by a Lion” (1763), a masterly view of a terrified equine, mane streaming and mouth agape, as it tries to shake off a hungry lion crouched on its back. The theme was common in Classical and Renaissance sculpture. In Stubbs’s day, the horse was regarded as a creature close to man; the lion represented brutal, untamed nature. We don’t see it in the painting, but the horse was destined to win by fighting a noble fight to the end. Stubbs’s painting anticipated the Romantic treatment of the subject by later artists like Eugène Delacroix and Antoine-Louis Barye.
Stubbs was famous in the England of his time, but his reputation declined sharply after his death because he was seen as simply a horse painter. He remained obscure until the 20th century, when his reputation was revived by scholarly study and the interest of Paul Mellon, Anglophile and equinophile, who acquired many of his works. This show, organized by the Tate Britain and the Walker Art Gallery in the artist’s native Liverpool, is said to be the first Stubbs presentation in a New York museum. The paintings are drawn from British collections and have rarely been seen here.
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Born to a prosperous family of Liverpool leather merchants, Stubbs taught himself art as a child, making drawings from bones lent to him by a local doctor. By the age of 21, having moved to York, he was seriously studying human and animal anatomy and lecturing privately on the subject to students at York Hospital. The town surgeon provided him with the body of a 110-year-old woman for dissection, and he apparently painted her likeness.
He spent 1756 through 1758 at a farmhouse in Lincolnshire, dissecting horses for his great anatomical manual, assisted by his future wife, Mary Spencer. He rigged up a suspension device for supporting a horse’s body upright, and proceeded to work in from skin to skeleton. Finding no one to engrave plates from his drawings, he did it himself, and so, while he continued to paint portraits and such for clients, he was able to publish the portfolio and sell it by subscription. Appearing in 1766, the widely acclaimed treatise “The Anatomy of the Horse” seemed to “throw him into horse painting,” he reportedly said.
Stubbs was fond of placing his subjects in a placid landscape, displaying them at their calmest, when their physical characteristics stood out, like “Mares and Foals in a River Landscape” (about 1763-65), showing two thoroughbred bay mares with their nuzzling offspring on a riverbank, set off by a beautiful white, virginal-looking onlooker that could have served as the mount for Lady Godiva.
“Five Hounds in a Landscape” (1762), painted for one of England’s wealthiest landowners, the second Marquess of Rockingham, depicts five handsome dogs of uniform pedigree in a row, tails held high, posed as if for judging. The lead male is at center, facing an interested female.
One of the show’s most amusing paintings is “The Lincolnshire Ox” (1790), depicting an enormous beast over six feet tall and weighing 3,000 pounds, won by one John Gibbons in a cockfight. In 1790 Gibbons took the ox and the victorious bird to London for a public exhibition. Stubbs’s painting, done for Gibbons as a model for subscription prints, shows the three swanning in St. James Park, each male in a winsome display.
Another lively scene is “Thomas Smith, Huntsman of the Brocklesby Hounds, and His Father, Thomas Smith, Former Huntsman, With the Hound Wonder” (1776). It shows the father and the son, each mounted on a stunning horse, as they set out “riding to covert” (fox-hunting), the spotted brown and white foxhound Wonder preceding them, eager for the hunt to begin. English county gentry never looked better.
As Stubbs grew older, he aimed at attracting a broader audience by a more democratic depiction of rural life. Two large paintings, “Haymakers” and “Reapers” (both 1785), carry out this intention, each depicting men and women in a choreographed, stylized ritual of raking and reaping grain. They are dressed in celebratory finery as they go about their work.
Brilliantly painted, with meticulous attention to figures and details (there are horses in these paintings, too), the works are hailed today as among Stubbs’s greatest masterpieces. They got him admitted to the Royal Academy. But they were coolly received by critics, and I can see why. Attempting to elegize these time-honored country occupations, Stubbs has taken a classical distance from the players, coming up with candy-box scenes whose figures seem frozen.
Stubbs died in 1806, leaving his unfinished study “Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body With That of a Tiger and a Common Fowl.” His monuments are the horses he left behind.
“George Stubbs (1724-1806): A Celebration” continues through May 27 at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan; (212) 288-0700.
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