Scientific serenity: Judy Egerton's magnificent catalogue raisonne of George Stubbs celebrates the 'tender candour' of one of the greatest artists of the age of reason

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This sumptuous volume, with its handsome slipcase, weighs in at 8lb (on my bathroom scales), as much as a healthy new-born child. It is consequently not easy to handle, and its long columns of text, especially in the generous introductory chapters (which amount to a substantial book in themselves) do not make for straightforward reading. Fortunately they have been set (albeit with some confusing misprints) in an excellent typeface, Monotype Bell, and the overall design, by Derek Birdsall, makes for much visual pleasure. But why was this not issued in two manageable volumes, as Yale's other catalogues of British artists--Whistler, Constable, Turner, Blake and the rest--have been? Catalogues raisonnes are above all objects of use and ought to be comfortable to read. A second desideratum is high-quality illustrations, and there is no complaint there, although the designer's insistence on showing every work at a size proportionate to its true scale results in some unnecessarily small plates, and some oddly blank pages.

These may seem churlish quibbles in response to such a splendid book; and indeed, the sheer beauty of Stubbs's work, coupled with Judy Egerton's correspondingly lucid presentation, makes it a pleasure to consult (on a solid tabletop) despite such irritations. It is dedicated to the memory of Philip Larkin and Paul Mellon; the author knew both men, and prefaces her text with Larkin's poem 'At Grass'. We are conscious throughout that, although she evokes the 18th-century world of horse-breeding noblemen and landowners, Stubbs's subject-matter is of abiding interest, at least to the English and to anglophiles such as Mellon, who himself bred racehorses. It was his love of Stubbs, fostered by the specialist knowledge of the art historian Basil Taylor, that resurrected the artist from the near-total oblivion he endured until after World War n.

Egerton's copious background essay comprises chapters on Stubbs's early years in Liverpool, where he began painting portraits, his continuing apprenticeship in York, and his visit to Rome in the mid-1750s. There he saw the pre-hellenistic sculpture of a lion attacking a horse that was to remain an enduring inspiration and model throughout his career. Supplying subject matter that straddled the heroic and the animal, it provided him with material for pictures large and small for several decades. They explore the narrative of the horse first alarmed by the appearance of the beast, then attacked, mauled and finally overcome. Stubbs's largest treatment of the subject, both the most violent and the most restrainedly neoclassical, is quite early, the great canvas of 1762 in the Mellon collection at Yale.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This 'Old Master' subject may not have been the only fruit of his stay in Rome. Stubbs was a near neighbour there of Richard Wilson, who was then evolving his magisterial classical landscape style. Egerton sees no trace of 'camaraderie' between Stubbs and his fellow British artists in Italy, but his approach to landscape, an important element in his mature designs, may owe something to Wilson's serene, pared-down classicism.

Another chapter deals with his laborious, not to say Herculean, dissections of horses in a barn at Horkstow in Lincolnshire, for his classic study The Anatomy of the Horse. Egerton dwells on Stubbs's reputation as a 'scientific' depicter of animals, unafraid (perhaps from early familiarity- his father was a leather-dresser) to expose himself to stench and disease in pursuit of the truth to nature that shines out from his portraits not only of horses but also of dogs by the score, and many exotic beasts, including the magnificent cheetah that he painted for Sir George Pigot in about 1765, together with its two Indian attendants. These are fine portraits, as Basil Taylor observed, 'without a trace of superstition or European condescension'. Stubbs was employed by the famous Scottish anatomist brothers William and John Hunter to provide illustrations for their lectures; his Nylghau and Bull Moose, and a version of Warren Hastings's Yak all remain in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.

Egerton devotes a separate section to the paintings of brood mares, a special category in Stubbs's output that includes some of his most lyrical works (Fig. 1), where the rhythmic lines of horses in gentle, Houynhmhm-like colloquy are ravishingly deployed against porcelain skies and silvery foliage. (Egerton never mentions Swift's evocation of an ideal world peopled and governed by horses; it would be interesting to know whether Stubbs took notice of that extraordinary vision.)

There are sections on the economy of horse breeding, training and racing in the 18th century, expounded technically enough for us to grasp the complexity of the subject, but never descending into tedious jargon; likewise, the art and science of the great Josiah Wedgwood, potter, entrepreneur and industrial experimenter, and of Stubbs's own experiments in enamel painting on copper and ceramic plaque, are explained with care. The relative permanence of enamel encouraged Stubbs to confide to it many of his more ambitious pictorial ideas --mythological subjects, such as Phaeton Attempting to Drive the Horses of the Sun, or literary ones, such as Una and the Lion (Fig. 2)--the latter a portrait, of Isabella Saltonstall--and he executed at least two self-portraits in this medium. He also used etching as a means of perpetuating some of his most beautiful inventions.