Master of the horse: an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, confirms Stubbs's reputation as the greatest horse painter, yet, as Angus Trumble observes, he remains an elusive artist

Apollo, July, 2005 by Angus Trumble

One of the chief aims of 'George Stubbs, 1724-1806', Judy Egerton's great 1984-85 exhibition at the Tate Gallery, was to provide an eloquent rebuttal to Josiah Wedgwood's famous remark of 1780: 'Nobody suspects Mr Stubs [sic] of painting anything but horses & lions, or dogs & tigers.' Yet in his lifetime the horse was of course as much a problem for Stubbs's reputation as it was the cornerstone of his artistic practice. He did much to make it so. Although Stubbs was the Vesalius of the horse, and painted some of the greatest equine portraits that exist, within the institutional framework of the London art world he was stuck with the label of 'horse painter', and tried in vain to shed it.

Yet to some degree Stubbs's artistic reputation still remains comfortably mounted on horseback. 'Stubbs and the Horse', curated by Malcolm Warner, senior curator of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, is smaller, tighter and more sharply focused than Egerton's panoramic Tate show. It consists of thirty-five paintings, including twelve portraits of single horses, of which a number are unrivalled masterpieces, such as Lustre, With a Groom, c. 1760-62 (Yale Center for British Art). Five fine group portraits and one of the exquisite 'mare-and-foal' paintings join two portraits of Whistlejacket, including the National Gallery's magnificent equine nude, c. 1762--a celebrity (although he wasn't so famous when for many years he hung in Kenwood House)-and Scrub, with John Singleton Up, 1762, all of which were painted for the prime minister, the Marquess of Rockingham. Meanwhile, the largest and earliest of the 'horse-and-lion' paintings, Horse Attacked by a Lion, 1762, and its companion (both Yale Center for British Art), which are exactly the same size as Whistlejacket, though horizontally orientated, are regrettable absences. I must take responsibility for that: unfortunately they cannot travel.

Stubbs's fondness for the exquisitely sensitive 'horse-and-boy' rubbing down subjects--a Houyhnhnm counterbalance to the Yahoo aspect of his 'horse-and-lion' theme--is beautifully represented by Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Stable-Lad, and a Jockey, 1765 (Woolavington Collection). It is a great shame that the late masterpiece Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, 1800, could not be made available from Mount Stewart to fortify this psychologically fascinating aspect of the exhibition.

In all its venues the exhibition has begun with thirty of Stubbs's drawings for his magnum opus, The Anatomy of the Horse (1766)--as remarkable for its 50,000 words of meticulously drafted scientific text as it is for the exquisitely observed and executed plates he taught himself to etch. Stubbs meant his book to be used by artists no less than men of science. It was based on a gruelling regime of stinking dissections conducted in a damp, isolated Lincolnshire farmhouse over eighteen months between 1756 and 1758, assisted by poor Mary Spencer, his common-law wife, who stood on a stepladder pouring hot tallow into the veins of horse cadavers.

The logistical difficulties the drawings presented for Stubbs were partly solved by a system of iron hooks screwed into the ceiling, ropes or chains and presumably block and tackle or the equivalent--although we know Stubbs was tremendously strong, and hauled carcasses in and out of the house. Although planks were used to support the cadaver and keep its hooves in place, the making of these studies must have required careful adjustment so that the flayed subject conformed to the stance in outline of a living animal, counteracting any suggestion of limpness. The results must surely be among the most technically brilliant anatomical studies ever made.

Why did Stubbs go to Lincolnshire as soon as he returned from his brief visit to Rome in 1754? It is as if, with some shrewdness, he read the market for pictures in the light of the modern miracle of the thoroughbred racehorse--essentially brought into being in the early eighteenth century. The thoroughbred was, after all, what made Stubbs's great Whig patrons of the 1760s- Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Grosvenor and their racing cronies--tick. Stubbs's mid-career success was built on his superb portraits of their favourite horses. He used his Anatomy drawings to capture the interest of these patrons as soon as he moved to London in 1759.

In addition, in England attitudes about horses in general had evolved rapidly through the eighteenth century. John Wesley thought they might go to heaven. Swift's Houyhnhnms were creatures of supreme rationality. Horses were intelligent. Horses had feelings. The exhibition catalogue provides many points of access to the wider context in which Stubbs's horse paintings reside: three snappy essays each by Malcolm Warner and Robin Blake, as well as a valuable update on Stubbs's experiments in enamel and wax from the conservators Lance Mayer and Gay Myers.

Stubbs was teetotal for the last forty years of his life, which leaves the first forty intriguingly unaccounted for. His first marriage (to a Miss Townly?); the early portrait practice at York, about which we know very little; and the suggestion that Stubbs actually saw a Barbary lion attacking a horse in Morocco, when he stopped there on his way back to England from Rome, are among the most curious mysteries that surround the artist still. They all point to wonderful lacunae in Stubbs scholarship that cry out for more work. No doubt Egerton's long-awaited catalogue raisonne will lead the field (by many lengths) for some time to come, but for such a major artist Stubbs is at times maddeningly fugitive. This fine exhibition brilliantly revisits his equine practice by doing what he would surely have appreciated: putting the art before the horse.