George Stubbs, Painter

Book excerpt: George Stubbs is one of the greatest of British eighteenth-century painters, with a deep and unaffected sympathy for country life and the English countryside. This fully illustrated book outlines his career, followed by a catalogue raisonne (the first since Sir Walter Gilbey's short listing of 1898) of all his known works. One of the stickiest labels in the history of British art attached itself to Stubbs as 'Mr Stubbs the horse painter'. Over half of his paintings were of horses, each founded on the pioneering observations assembled (in 1766) in his book The Anatomy of the Horse; but Stubbs's wide-ranging subjects included portraits, conversation pieces and paintings of exotic animals from the Zebra to the Rhinoceros, as well as an extraordinarily sympathetic series of portraits of dogs.