On 25 August 1724, a child was born in what was then called “a remote commercial town where little is heard of save Guinea-ships, slaves and merchandise” by a contemporary (Mould, 2005). This child was George Stubbs, who was born in Liverpool, as we now know it, to “Honest John” Stubbs, a currier – that’s to say, a specialist in leather processing. His father’s work must have brought George into contact with many animals stripped bare of their hide, and even by the age of eight, little George Stubbs had begun to make drawings of bones borrowed from Dr Holt (a remarkable if eccentric educator in Kirkdale, a village then just three miles from the town).
Although George’s father was not initially happy for his son to enter any trade other than his own, George’s talent as an artist eventually led to his being apprenticed to the Warrington portrait painter Hamlet Winstanley. At that time, Winstanley was engaged in copying the pictures owned by the Earl of Derby at his house in Knowsley. This arrangement does not seem to have been a happy one as the young Stubbs was not allowed the free rein he wanted, but also because George did not enjoy merely copying the work of other artists. As he eventually confided to his friend Ozias Humphrey, whose memoir gives us much of what we know of Stubbs’s life and work, George aimed to make “all his studies from nature” (Humphrey et al., 2005).
At the age of 20, George left Liverpool and worked as a portrait painter in Wigan, which was a bigger town back then. A year later, he moved to Leeds and then York. Even by this time, Stubbs was making what Humphrey tells us was a serious study of human and animal anatomy: he was giving lectures at the infirmary in the town to the pupils of Charles Atkinson, the town surgeon. The other medical doctor in the city was Dr John Burton, who commissioned George to produce drawings for his new text, An Essay Towards a Complete New System of Midwifery (Figure 1).
It is here that we first see Stubbs’s artistic expertise manifest in anatomical drawings. In fact, the drawings are unsigned – this was a time when anatomical dissections were mostly produced from corpses procured by grave robbers, the so-called “resurrection men”, so it may have been that Stubbs would not have wanted to be associated with such illustrations. It is, therefore, Joseph Mayer, Stubbs’s co-biographer alongside Humphrey, who tells us that these illustrations are indeed by George (Humphrey et al., 2005).
Later, a letter penned by William Frankland to Joseph Banks tells us of the “vile renown” in which Stubbs was held in York at the time. However, Frankland also referred more positively to Stubbs’s portrait painting. Working for families such as that of Sir Henry Nelthorpe in North Lincolnshire brought in sufficient income that Stubbs could undertake the Grand Tour.
Any young Georgian artist would grab the chance to visit Italy to admire the Graeco-Roman sculptures and Renaissance portraits. However, as Humphrey and Mayer tell us, Stubbs went to convince himself that “nature was and always is the superior to Art whether Greek or Roman”, and he was already back in Liverpool by the Christmas of 1755. Although neither he nor his biographers tell us as much, it is quite possible that while in Rome Stubbs encountered the Mattei horse, a sculpture of a flayed equid demonstrating the muscles and tendons that lay underneath the skin (Figure 2). Perhaps that gave Stubbs an idea.
On his return to England, George lodged near Hull and completed portraits he had been commissioned to paint before his continental tour. But he soon began the work that would define him in perpetuity. He rented out a barn on an isolated farm near Horkstow in the bleak Lincolnshire fens where, for 18 months, he drew, flayed, drew again, dissected and drew horse cadavers some more. It seems he was alone but for his companion – potentially his common-law wife – Mary Spencer. The cadavers he drew were bled to death by cutting the jugular vein and the vessels injected with tallow. Then the carcass was lifted using tackle, with the hooves supported by wooden blocks. The skin was flayed off, and the muscles dissected one by one.
At this time, equine anatomy was served by Carlo Ruini’s 1598 Dell Anatomia et dell Infirmita del Cavallo, which was considered an outstanding piece of work (Figure 3A). In Great Britain, 90 years later, Andrew Snape published his Anatomy of an Horse (Figure 3B). Snape was farrier to King Charles II and stated that he had “broken the ice [since] none having gone before me or shown me the way”. However, he was clearly being somewhat economical with the truth. As can be seen from the illustrations in Figure 3, Snape’s work is an almost exact copy of Ruini’s.
George Stubbs’s Anatomy of the Horse (“Anatomy”) was a work on an entirely different scale: its 24 plates with explanatory text show the horse from different aspects with muscles annotated on a reference plate for each illustration (Figure 3C). The accuracy is remarkable; it could be said that Stubbs’s prime interest was in anatomical detail, giving rise to the form and allowing the most accurate and anatomical paintings of the horse (Figure 4).
After 18 months of painstaking and, one must presume, pretty nauseous work producing the illustrations for Anatomy, George took his images to London to be engraved. Imagine his distress to find that no professional engraver would take the work on. Undeterred, Stubbs taught himself how to engrave and took on this work himself; it was six years before the work was published as a subscription volume.
The move to London and publication of Anatomy was a turning-point in George’s life. At 36 years old, he suddenly found himself with patrons – from Viscounts Torrington and Bollingbroke, the Dukes of Grafton, Richmond and Portland and the Marquis of Rockingham – queuing up to support him. But even with all this work, as Mayer tells us, “no temptation led him to invent a muscle, nor did he put his creatures into an attitude. They were always as nature made… often ugly but always true.”
George Stubbs was there at the beginning of the Thoroughbred horse as we know it today. Native mares were covered by imported stallions of Arabian, Barb and Turkoman breeding – specifically the Byerley Turk, the Darley and Godolphin Arabians and Curwen’s Bay Barb.
Many Thoroughbred offspring were painted by Stubbs: Matcham, grandson of the Godolphin Arabian; Herod, great-grandson of the Byerley Turk; and Eclipse, Herod’s undefeated great-great-grandson. Many owners wanted their prize steeds painted by George, and he worked tirelessly, rendering him the key artist for the horse then and, in truth, for all time (Figure 5).
After a while, commissions gradually decreased, but this allowed George to begin a new and final project – sadly, one he did not live to complete – that of a comparative anatomy text. A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl did what the title suggested (Figure 6).
Here, Stubbs shows his interest in anatomy not merely for art’s sake, but with a scientific depth that shines through all his studies. Remember this was a century before Darwin and the concept of the evolution of different species, yet right at the beginning of his work Stubbs’s comparative anatomy text clearly shows that he understood that the limb of the horse was analogous to the human digit, with the carpals, metacarpals and phalanges noted as such (Figure 6).
“With their steady gaze,” Stubbs’s self-portraits (Figure 7) are, as Mould describes them (Mould, 2005), “notably taciturn, and in them, as in all his work, one senses not just a fairness of mind, but also complexity and introspection. Yet these qualities never cloud the innate grip on reality and a constantly exercised discrimination.” Just what was needed to make the ultimate anatomical artist.
