Hero of the turf

George Stubbs, born 300 years ago, found Nature superior to art and approached his pictures with the eye of an anatomy scholar, yet no contemporary could rival him in capturing the elegance and character of racehorses, dogs and even zebras, as Jack Watkins discovers

- Jack Watkins

YOU could trace the history of the early years of the Turf through George Stubbs’s racehorse pictures. Marske, Eclipse, Gimcrack, Dungannon and Hambletonian were among the 18th-century champions he painted, sometimes set against the vast, austere backdrop of Newmarket Heath, the spiritual home of Flat racing. Ironically, however, Stubbs did not care for the crowds and noise of racetracks. His images were more reposeful and he seldom showed horses in their galloping strides. Perhaps it’s fitting that the animal in his most famous picture, Whistlejacket, was not even a great racehorse and was only moderately successful at stud.

Ever since the National Gallery acquired Stubbs’s rousing study of the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham’s prancing, flaxen-maned stallion in 1997, it has been one of the museum’s most popular paintings, a spellbinding portrait of grace, power and wildness. Yet only recently has Stubbs received adequate recognition. In his lifetime, he was disparagingly referred to as ‘Mr. Stubbs, horse painter’. After his death in 1806, with the finest works in private collections, he nearly disappeared from view. How could a man whose favoured subjects were racehorses be worth close scrutiny? Vigorous advocacy by art historian Basil Taylor, the author of Stubbs (1971), eventually sparked a revival of interest and, by 2007, Judy Egerton’s description of the artist in her painstaking George Stubbs, Painter (2007) as ‘one of the greatest of British 18th-century painters, with a deep and unaffected sympathy for country life and the English countryside’ could hardly be disputed. It’s surprising that the 300th anniversary of his birth is not to be marked by a national exhibition.