Stubbs [antikvár]

GEORGE STUBBS Often enough it has talcen a long time to recognize the true worth of great artists, even .when they have had some measure of respect or success; and so it has been with George Stubbs. Born in 1724 he lived until 1806, reaching his maturity as a painter in the great age of English art but without then gaining any such celebrity as that of Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough. He had his patrons mainly among the sporting aristocracy, who required pictures of their favourite diversions of hunting and racing and portraits of their horses. He was thus numbered among the several pictorial specialists of the turf and the hunting field and accounts ofhis work confined him to this limited field until a broader critical view in the twentieth century revealed the full extent of his achievement. Stubbs was no sportsman. How little he merited the description of'sporting painter', frequently used in the past to pair him with his younger contemporary, Ben Marshall, becomes clear from the difference between them. Marshall, a devotee of Newmarket, wrote about and painted with equal gusto sporting events and personahties; as the journalistic 'Observator' of The Sporting Magazine, he was a skilled chronicler of the racecourse. Stubbs on the contrary recorded neither famous runs with hounds (except, in the earh' years of his commissioned employment, The Grosvenor Hunt, Plate 7), nor close finishes at Newmarket or Epsom. The scenes he depicted were 'before' or 'after'; the specific action or contest was ofF-stage. A superficial likeness may be found between Stubbs and Marshall in the treatment of the portrait theme of horse and groom, but when Stubbs's work is surveyed as a whole, we see him on another and grander level, in a far wider context. Firstly, he records much that was typical ofhis time. He conveys the essence of country Hfe in its golden age, the age of the great Whig landowners whose mansions were centres of social life, art and sport, and were in some degree the research headquarters of rural production. No observer of the rural scene more vividly recalls the bounteous harvests for which the later eighteenth century was noted, the atmosphere of peace and plenty not yet menaced by corn law repeal. His pictures of rural landscape and labour were idyllic masterpieces. He can also be viewed as an artist in the classic European tradition. This appears in a capacity to generalize, to construct a composition (a skill apart from—though not incompatible with - that of illustration). A conscious intelligence planned the niceties of spacing between one object or figure and another, the subtleties of geometrical ratio, the spaciousness of total cffect. He could sum up the characteristics of the human beings as well as the animals in his pictures in a way that makes one feel his grooms, jockeys and stableboys are not merely the conventional accessories of the animal painter but true archetypes of their race and kind. He had much of that scientific curiosity earlier so typical of the masters of the Renaissance. He was like Leonardo in his researches into anatomy, studies that he pursued throughout his life with resolute devotion. They extended from The Anatomy of the Horse to the comparison of the structure of the human body with that of a tiger and a common fowl, on which he was engaged up to the time ofhis death. The late Basil Taylor,