A Vision of Four-Legged Order

By ROBERT HUGHES

In London, the unsurpassed animal paintings of George Stubbs

Throughout his long life, and for 150 years after his death, George Stubbs (1724-1806) was known as a horse painter. Never mind the Parthenon frieze, the Marcus Aurelius, the equestrian portraits of Verrocchio or Donatello, or any of the rest of the vast repertory of equine imagery in Western art: horse painting, like "sporting" art generally, tends to be seen as a minor style of aesthetic tailoring, shaped to reflect the blunt amusements of a class not much liked by connoisseurs. Painters like Sir Alfred Munnings, who filled canvas after canvas with accurate replications of poised fetlocks and lobb boots, are despised by art critics; and even in the 18th century, the age of the horse par excellence, Stubbs' attainments were looked down on by his fellow painters.

Today one sees him differently, not just as an animalier but as an artist of the whole rural scene, including its people. Stubbs had a haunted, driven side, and its combination with his visions of social tranquillity was like nothing else in 18th century art. His anatomical studies of the horse, dense with thought and laden with death, rivaled Leonardo's anatomies and, like them, came from grueling years of dissection and observation. His variations on a favorite subject, the white horse neighing in anguish as it is mauled by a lion in the wilderness, are among the archetypes of romantic imagination, comparable in intensity to Goya or Gericault. Finally, he was a minute and sympathetic watcher at the human theater of the English class system.

In sum, Stubbs was not just an interesting minor artist but a thoroughly absorbing one who often rose to greatness--as well as the best horse painter who ever lived. And since the exhibition of his work that opened Oct. 17 at London's Tate Gallery--102 paintings along with 77 drawings and prints--will go, with some substitutions and deletions, to the Yale Center for British Art in February, American museumgoers will be able to test for themselves the feeling, now spreading in England, that Stubbs is to be ranked with Turner and Constable in English painting. Whether one feels this or not, the show, curated by Art Historian Judy Egerton, is a revelation.

Stubbs lived at a time of intense curiosity about the animal world. Strange creatures and people from the corners of a growing empire drew crowds when they were put on show in rented London rooms; photography had not made all things familiar. The wonders of Africa, America and the Pacific glared peevishly back at the Georgian dilettanti from their wooden dens and dirty straw. "Just arrived from Botany-Bay," ran a newspaper advertisement in 1789, "three new live animals for the amusement of the public, with that 3 singular animal the African Savage, a noble Lion and Lioness, a pair of 3 beautiful Leopards, a Lynx, a Sangwin, the Arabian nightwalker ... the Spotted Negro attends from eleven to seven in the evening."

Stubbs painted quite a few such marvels (though not, alas, the Arabian nightwalker or the Spotted Negro). He portrayed lemurs, monkeys, a rhinoceros and several leopards, and foreign animals gave him the pretext for two of his greatest images. One of these was a painting of a cheetah that had been sent to London as a gift to George III from a former governor-general of Madras. It is a marvel of detached observation. In straightforwardness and dignity, unblemished by caricature, the heads of the animal's two Indian handlers rank with Rubens' famous studies of an African black. The evocation of substance, from the hair of the cheetah--done in a rippling amber pelt of short directional strokes interspersed with broader whiskery featherings--to the play of light on the white turbans and dhotis, is breathtaking.

The second exotic subject is more mysterious, almost surreal. It is a zebra mare, which had been brought from the Cape of Good Hope and given to Queen Charlotte in 1762. This "painted African, ass," the first seen in England, was installed in the royal menagerie at Buckingham Gate. When he came to paint it, Stubbs set it in an English wood, its black-and-white hide in almost shocking contrast to the green tunnels of boscage and filtered shade that stretch behind it. It is as though one had taken a wrong turn in the Forest of Arden and encountered a mildly grazing apparition from another world.

Like all great artists, Stubbs was quite unsentimental, and his work reminds us what a recent invention the idea that "animals are only human" really is. His animals are always presented in the full "otherness" of their animal nature. He kept to this even when painting that traditional focus of woozy emotion, the dog. Stubbs rendered the lean ferocity of the staghound, or the compact, questing efficiency of the foxhound, with perfect respect for their actual being as creatures in their own world. Even when he did pets--as in Fino and Tiny, circa 1791, which is dominated by a superbly rhythmical profile of the Prince of Wales' black-and-white spitz Fino--he set down their complicated markings and baroque puffs of newly washed hair with a measured, objective enthusiasm that transcended any hint of cuteness.

Of course, there is pathos in Stubbs' hunting scenes. His portrait of the Earl of Clarendon's gamekeeper about to cut a doe's throat in a darkening wood is a gravely haunting mixture of the archaic and the matter-of-fact. Venison, to be eaten, must be killed, but the thickening shadows seem to enfold a more sacrificial rite than the mere stocking of a larder. This, like all Stubbs' paintings, must also be seen as a manifesto of the supreme ideology of late 18th century England: the celebration and defense of property. If the wrong person killed that doe, he would be transported or hanged.

It was the now vanished tone of 18th century landed society--fenced about with deadly capital statutes, but also bound intimately together by chains of patronage running vertically through the classes--that enabled Stubbs to paint his admirably varied theater of land work, from haymakers to grooms, trainers and jockeys, without the least sign of overt condescension. Across the Channel, patrons liked pictures of drunken, vomiting peasants in the Dutch manner: a class zoo. Not in England, where Stubbs painted the cult of the horse with rapt attention, as a ritual focus of many skills and several mutually dependent classes.

The horse was his chief image of social harmony: order on four legs. No wonder that, in such paintings as Eclipse at Newmarket, With a Groom and a Jockey, circa 1770, the plain rubbing-down houses on Newmarket Heath look like neo-Egyptian shrines, pyramids of the turf. They are, so to speak, the temples of Stubbs' Utopia, a place adjacent to Jonathan Swift's imaginary country of the Houyhnhnms, those sagacious and moralizing horses.

Horses not only had ideal attributes in this scheme of things, they also made plausible heroes. The great example is Stubbs' prosaically titled Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, 1800. Hambletonian, winner of both the St. Leger and the Doncaster Gold Cup in 1796, belonged 3 to a rich and deep-gambling young baronet named Sir Henry Vane-Tempest. In 1799 Vane-Tempest put him up against Diamond, another star horse, for a purse of 3,000 guineas. (At the time, a farmer's laborer might have made the equivalent of five guineas a year.) The match drew the biggest crowd and the heaviest side-betting ever seen at Newmarket, and amid scenes of hysterical excitement Hambletonian won the four-mile race by half a neck. He finished "shockingly goaded," lathered in blood from whip and spur. To commemorate the victory, Vane-Tempest had the 7 5-year-old Stubbs paint him life size.

The result was not only the largest canvas of Stubbs' career but the grandest in structure and, to modern eyes, the most suggestive. That immense, glossy brown frame of the horse, floating across one's whole field of vision, has the compulsive power of a dream image. In the interest of decorum, Stubbs left out the wounds and weals on Hambletonian's flanks, but his sympathies remained with the animal: white slaver flecks his mouth, the ears lie back flat, and the pink tongue lolls in the aftermath of exhaustion. The creature is attended, none too reverently, by brown pragmatic dwarfs. One cannot imagine that a more rhetorical horse--one of Rubens' baroque equine wardrobes, say, all flourishing hoofs and cascading mane--could possess the same intensity. Hambletonian may have been sired by a classical frieze, but his only foal would be the horse in Guernica, thrusting its outraged neck toward the indifferent sky of the 20th century. --By Robert Hughes