George Stubbs

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Self-portrait of George Stubbs on horseback

George Stubbs RA (born August 25, 1724 in Liverpool , † July 10, 1806 in London ) was an English painter, engraver and anatomist .

Stubbs is considered one of the most important European painters of animals and especially of horses. He was also a lecturer in human and animal anatomy at York Hospital and published several works on anatomy, including the book The Anatomy of the Horse .

life and work

Stubbs grew up in Liverpool as the son of a leather tanner and dealer. At a young age he worked in his parents' business. After the death of his father in 1741 he was briefly apprenticed to a painter and engraver in Lancashire . He disliked the work, which consisted mainly of copying other works. From then on he learned his skills as an autodidact . He worked as a portrait painter in the 1740s before studying human anatomy at York County Hospital from around 1745 to 1751 . In 1754 he made a trip to Italy.

Whistlejacket by George Stubbs, ca.1760

In 1756 he rented a farm in Horkstow , Lincolnshire , and spent considerable time studying and dissecting horses. In 1759 he moved to London and worked on his work The Anatomy of the Horse , which he published in 1766. Even before the publication of this work, he stood out for his precise knowledge and reproduction of the anatomy of animals, especially horses. Since his first commissioned work for the Duke of Richmond , who ordered three large paintings, Stubbs's livelihood was assured. He was quickly considered the favorite painter of the nobility in his field and thus came to a certain degree of wealth.

His best-known work is Whistlejacket (painting of a rising horse), which was commissioned by the two-time Prime Minister Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham and which can be seen today in the National Gallery in London . Further works are u. a. in the Neue Pinakothek or the Walker Art Gallery .

At an auction at Christie's in London in 2011, the Gimcrack painting with a groom on Newmarket Heath fetched $ 48 million, the highest price ever paid for a George Stubbs painting. The picture was put up for auction by the British Woolavington Collection of sporting art , the buyer is unknown.

Studies in anatomy

Stubbs, who worked in his father's tannery and leather business until he was 16, was no stranger to handling animal carcasses, and according to his own statements, he became interested in anatomy from an early age. In 1745 he moved to York , where he began studying anatomy at York County Hospital in the late 1740s and was soon teaching anatomy himself.

Illustration for John Burton: Essays towards a Complete New System of Midwifery.

There he dissected a woman who had died in childbed and made drawings of the fetus . However, these first attempts lack the precision of his later anatomical drawings: the plates do not depict fetuses, but rather adult infants. These drawings were the basis for his illustrations for John Burton's "Essays towards a Complete New System of Midwifery". The book was published in 1751 without naming Stubbs as the author of the plates.

After returning from Italy, he rented the house in Lincolnshire , where he dissected horses from 1756 to 1758. After the horses had bled through a cut in the jugular vein ( vena jugularis ), a liquid wax was injected in order to better identify the course of the vessels during the dissection. The carcass was then hung on a special construction from the ceiling and dissected layer by layer down to the skeleton. The individual work steps were meticulously documented in protocols. The methods he used to try to slow the decomposition process is not documented in his records. He published the results of his work in 1766 in his book " The Anatomy of the Horse ". Since the leading copper engravers in London at the time refused to make engravings on the basis of his drawings, he finally took over this work himself after he had perfected his knowledge of copperplate engraving himself. The original drawings are now part of the inventory of the Royal Academy of Arts .

Drawing for A Comparative Anatomical Exposition

From 1804 to 1806 his last, unfinished work, "Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and the Common Fowl" was published in London. Such comparative anatomical studies were not uncommon in the Age of Enlightenment . Originally, 60 picture panels and accompanying texts in English and French were planned. When Stubbs died in 1806 the text was written and all the preliminary drawings were available, but only half of the plates were engraved. The drawings, measuring 54.6 × 40.6 cm, remained in his wife's possession until 1817, were sold after her death and changed hands several times, one of whom had the drawings mounted on cardboard. In 1863 they ended up in the Worcester Public Library, where they were forgotten and not rediscovered until 1957. In 1980, Paul Mellon acquired the drawings and manuscript for the Yale Center for British Art , where they were restored and returned to their original condition.

Works (selection)

A Lion Attacking a Horse , 1770, Yale University Art Gallery
  • Hound Coarsing a Stag , around 1762, Philadelphia Museum of Art , Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
  • Gimcrack with a groom on Newmarket Heath , 1765, private collection.
  • A Cheetah and a Stag with Two Indian Attendants , 1765, Manchester Art Gallery , Manchester, England.
  • The Milbanke and Melbourne Families around 1769, National Gallery , London.
  • Whistlejacket , National Gallery , London.
  • Newmarket Heath, with a Rubbing-down House , c.1765, Yale Center for British Art.
  • Horse Frightened by a Lion , Walker Art Gallery , Liverpool.
  • Lions and a Lioness with a Rocky Background , 1776, Victoria and Albert Museum , London.
  • The Marquess of Rockinham's Arabian Stallion , 1780, Scottish National Gallery , Edinburgh.
  • Horse in the Shade of a Wood , 1780, Tate Gallery London.
  • Leopards at Play , 1780, Tate Gallery London.
  • Portrait of a Young Gentleman Out Shooting , 1781, Tate Gallery London.
  • A Gentleman driving a Lady in a Phaeton 1787, National Gallery, London.
  • The Prince of Wales's Phaeton , 1793, Royal Collection Trust.
  • William Anderson with two Saddle-Horses , 1793, Royal Collection Trust.

Fonts

His last work on anatomy, on which he worked until his death, was the Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body, with that of a Tiger and Common Fowl , for which he had already made around 100 drawings and 18 copperplate engravings. However, he was unable to finish the work for printing. A complete edition of his illustrations for specialist anatomy books was published in 1950 by Terence Doherty under the title The Anatomical Works of George Stubbs .

Exhibitions

literature

  • Basil Taylor: Stubbs. London: Phaidon Press 1971. ISBN 0-7148-1498-9
  • Terence Doherty: The Anatomical Works of George Stubbs . London, Secker u. Warburg 1974. ISBN 0-436-12990-6
  • Gerhard Charles Rump : Horses and hunting pictures in English art, studies of George Stubbs and the genre of "Sporting Art" from 1650–1830. 1983 Olms, Hildesheim, New York
  • The Great Artists, Vol. 50, George Stubbs. 1985, Marshall Cavendish, London

Web links

Commons : George Stubbs  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the Saleroom: George Stubbs' Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath , accessed June 18, 2015.
  2. ↑ Stubbs, George. The Anatomy of the Horse. Retrieved June 28, 2015.
  3. ↑ Tom Lubboc Great Works: A Complete New System of Midwifery (1751), 4 ills. Accessed on June 28, 2015.
  4. ↑ Doherty 1974. p. 9.
  5. ↑ Doherty 1974. p. 9.
  6. ^ Judy Egerton: George Stubbs, Painter. London, 2007. p. 93.
  7. ^ Yale Center of British Art.Retrieved June 29, 2015.
  8. ↑ George Stubbs: A Celebration
  9. ^ To the 2012 exhibition in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
  10. ↑ In search of the essence of the animal in FAZ of January 30, 2012, p. 27
  11. ↑ Metmuseum
  12. ↑ Exhibition Mauritshuis, 20.2-1.6.2020
personal data
SURNAME Stubbs, George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English painter and scientist
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1724
PLACE OF BIRTH Liverpool
DATE OF DEATH July 10, 1806
Place of death London