NO NEED to worry if you didn’t make it up to Royal Ascot in York. You can take a trip to the National Gallery instead. Its new show, Stubbs and the Horse, is your entrée into the owners’ and trainers’ paddock.
There is plenty of fine horseflesh, quite literally in the case of the artist’s anatomical drawings, a selection of which are on display in an introductory gallery.
Stubbs’s meticulously recorded dissections of equine carcasses, which he hauled up on hooks and arranged in lifelike positions before peeling them like onions, layer by layer, laid the ground for an artistic career by which a “mere horse painter” set out to challenge the received opinion that declared that history painting — grand mythical scenes and great battles — was the highest calling of any artistic creator. It is the power of this challenge that this show celebrates. In his day Stubbs earned lucrative commissions because his work was so lifelike.
Story has it that Whistlejacket, the prancing centrepiece of the exhibition, reared up and attacked his image when he caught sight of it. Certainly the spectator is impressed not just by the anatomical precision of each work but by the sense of character it captures. Some of the animals seem almost to shy away from you as you approach. But Stubbs was aiming higher. He brings a portraitist’s subtlety to his subjects. His fillies pose as aristocratic young ladies. Thoroughbreds boast their bloodlines as surely as any nobleman. The intimate group studies (Stubbs tends to focus on the quieter moments of an animal’s life: the rubbing down after the race, for instance, rather than the uproarious win) are the equine equivalent of the period conversation piece. A composition of mares and foals unscrolls like a classical frieze.
The show comes to a grand finale with a series of Stubbs’s histrionic paintings of horses attacked by a lion. Demon-eyed cats pounce with raking claws upon their prey or prowl maliciously through rocky crannies. To the modern eye they look ludicrously melodramatic. But to contemporary audiences, nerves trilling to an awakening spirit of Romanticism, they must have evoked a sense of spell-binding terror glimpsed from a safe distance. In Stubbs’s hands, it seems, the horse can become sublime.
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Stubbs and the Horse is at the National Gallery from June 29 to September 5 (020-7747 2885)