Animal painting was long seen as an inferior specialization. The new exhibition in the Maurishuis in The Hague, in which the famous horse painter George Stubbs is central, shows that this is an outdated idea.
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At a time when the heroic deeds of mankind, religious or mythological representations were still highly valued, Stubbs put the horse first. Not the rider or the companion filled the image, but the horse itself.
Equestrian sport was a cult in the eighteenth-century United Kingdom. Maybe even more than in our time. The quadruped gave the owner – just like the car owner now – enormous status. Breed characteristics, beauty of the individual animal and performance in the field of sport ensured respect and economic gain.
Sport prizes and income from horse breeding made it interesting to immortalize the animals in the form of a horse portrait. Stubbs mastered the genre like no other and he received his commissions mainly from the elite.
He focused on careful images of the animal itself. Not the jockey or the wealthy duke filled the picture. And that Stubbs took his task seriously, is shown in the exhibition by ten anatomical drawings of horses.
Stubbs isolated himself in a barn to dissect horses
Between 1756 and 1758, the British animal painter isolated himself for eighteen months to dissect horses in a shed near Hull and carefully select them layer by layer.
The most popular work by Stubbs is the portrait of race horse Whistlejacket from 1762 from the National Gallery in London. The stallion is shown in life-size format, standing on the hind legs. Due to the absence of human absence, his pose and the monotonous background, the animal demands our full attention. Never before has an animal been depicted in such a way.
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