George Stubbs is commonly hailed as the quintessential English artist. Few country homes are not furnished with his horsey prints. His images seem as comfortably familiar as the club fender, as much a part of our rural heritage as the smell of wet spaniels in the hall. But is this right?
Certainly it was not always so. Born in 1724, this talented and in large part self-trained son of a Liverpudlian currier was marginalised in his lifetime as a mere sporting artist. His tremendous facility as an equine portraitist may have attracted lucrative commissions from horse-mad noblemen, but after he died in 1806, in what were described as “indifferent” financial circumstances, he was in large part forgotten by art history. His name was omitted from Allan Cunningham’s canonical catalogue of eminent British painters. He passed unmentioned by Ruskin. And it was not until late in the 1950s when the Whitechapel Gallery staged a show that took a groundbreaking new tack that fresh interest was stirred.
In the ensuing 50 years, he has at last received the respect he deserves, helped in large part by the anglophile American art-collector Paul Mellon, whose avid enthusiasm (he collected some 40 canvases) sent prices soaring.
This year marks the bicentenary of Stubbs’s death. It was heralded last summer by a major National Gallery exhibition — Stubbs and the Horse — which celebrated his undisputed skill as an equine artist. This is now complemented by a smaller show of his work which this week travels from Liverpool to Tate Britain, where it will remain until the end of the year when it moves to the Frick, the first time that Stubbs has been shown in a public gallery in New York — a significant sign that his reputation is rapidly expanding beyond the parameters of mere national interest.
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Of course, Stubbs’s reputation still rests principally on his equine portraits. But in his lifetime, when an artistic establishment (dominated by the lofty Sir Joshua Reynolds) believed in strict hierarchies which put history painting highest, sporting pictures were pretty much dismissed as a genre for those at the jobbing end of the market.
No wonder that Stubbs, when selecting works for public exhibition, tended to emphasise other kinds of painting. He showed works that portrayed scenes from rustic life, displayed skills as a landscapist or revelled in the idiosyncracies of the exotic new wild creatures that the crowds queued up to gawp at in London menageries at the time.
Perhaps, then, this coming Tate show is the sort of exhibition that Stubbs himself might have put on. The 25 works stress the diversity of the output of a painter who was constantly struggling to widen his reputation as it moves from an unflatteringly observant portrait of a lumpen local dignitary painted by a struggling young apprentice, through the sort of studies of horseflesh that made him so fashionable in sporting circles and his histrionic images of attacking lions, to his innovative experiments in precise enamel paintings and his various attempts at pastoral genre scenes and rural landscapes.
Together they present a complex portrait of an extremely complex and intriguing man whose rather hazy (and perhaps wilfully obfuscated) life story, biographers have suggested, may include anything from incest to involvement in robbing graves. Stubbs is far from some simple establishment figure.
We may now be happy to celebrate him as being among our most famous and popular native painters, but what exactly was the nature of his achievement? The longer you look at the pictures in this new show the more questions will arise.
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In one sense he was the product of his Enlightenment era. His talent — as his famous dissections of horses, layer after layer of their muscles peeled and meticulously recorded at every stage of exposure in what must amount to one of the most malodorous, gruesome and demanding exercises in the whole of art history — finds its roots in a spirit of clinical scientific inquiry, of the empirical examination so current in philosophical circles of the day.
It is this intense naturalism that he brings again and again to his paintings, to the faces in his portraits, to his study of the cheetah, to the quivering musculature of Molly Longlegs. And yet this is the truth that he also flouts. He panders to clients, making their animals look taller and slimmer and faster, like some souped-up fashion-model version of a horse. He depicts the cheetah in all its immaculate detailed observation alongside a stag which he appears to have made up.
He appeals directly to contemporary fashions for grand elemental dramas with his histrionic images of a lion leaping upon a horse in which the classical poses of Hellenistic marbles are brought together with a taste for the spell-binding dramas of Burke’s Sublime.
But at the same time he stubbornly continues to paint in what was seen as a formulaic and outmoded style, his brushstrokes lacking the fluency expected of the sentimental artist. He persists in pursuing his “hobby horse”, painting in enamels on Wedgwood ceramic plaques, even though his efforts were at that time dismissed. He satirises the patrons who paid him, mocking the pomposity, for instance, of the owner of the great Hereford bull the Lincolnshire Ox by presenting him ridiculously small and strutting like his companion cockerel behind the enormous beast.
And Stubbs’s last great project, a comparative anatomy of a feline, a fowl and a man, though pursued with typical rigour and fervour, was hardly designed to earn high acclaim.
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Was it an oddly pointless folly or a fascinating precursor to Darwinism? Is Stubbs a product of the Enlightenment or an early Romantic? Did he look for facts or for poetic insights? Is he searching for a truth or refining a formula? Is he trying to flatter or is he being satirical?
This is a painter who throws up endless questions, who presents constant contradictions. There are no resolutions. Stubbs’s reputation may have soared to great heights in recent years, but quite what he achieved is not certain. Perhaps that multi-faceted awkwardness is a crucial part of his point. He cannot be pigeonholed, as he was in his own era. He is far more challenging than we seem to have allowed.
Stubbs is not an artist who can be neatly packaged and presented as part of the Establishment. He was far too stubbornly idiosyncratic for that. And his eccentricity may be the most quintessentially English thing about him.
George Stubbs: A Celebration is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1 (020-7887 8000), from August 21