Art, class and horses

At the extremity of June the most significant exhibition upon George Stubbs for twenty years render free of accessed at the National Gallery, London, to single muted cheers from the pres and the public. There has been within the Gallery apprehension that it was likely to be an anti-climax after the triumphs of the preceding sum of two units exhibitions in the Sainsbury Wing, 'Raphael: From Urbino to Rome' and 'Caravaggio: the Final Years'. It is too early finally to justice but 'Stubbs and the Horse' (reviewed in APOLLO last month) appear to bes unlikely to provoke a similar horizontal of enthusiasm. The press cannot be blamed: the public collection ed to 'Raphael' despite some remarkably obtuse reviews.

There are many reasons wherefore one Old Master exhibition is a barn-storming triumph and another is not. With Stubb for a British audience at any rate, there is likely to be a feeling that, unlike early Raphael or late Caravaggio, his work is well-known and easy to diocese (although a high number of his works are in private collections, a certain quantity of very inaccessible indeed). Other factors governing the exhibition's reception that have been privately debated in the National Gallery are class and political agriculture and it is indeed arguable that in Britain this is not a propitious trice for an exhibition depicting the upper classes and individual of their favourite possessions, the horse.

This may not be apparent to foreign visitors to the exhibition, unaware that there is an extraordinarily divisive debate in Britain above hunting with dogs, which was outlawed through Act of Parliament in England earlier this year (and in Scotland in 2002) The debate above these measures revealed a wide gap between rural and urban opinion that went well beyond issues of animal welfare, as traditional Tory England (and Scotland) rest itself on the defensive.

a certain quantity of of the reviews of the exhibition raised of that kind notions forcefully: in the course of a largely favourable account in The beholder (3 July), Rachel Cooke pok pleasantry at its visitors: 'men in too-bright corduroys and signet rings, and women in Alice bands and quilted jackets, who could be heard discussing, in high-sounding voices and mildly obsessive detail, of the like kind details as saddles and livery'. The descendants of Stubbs's patrons, and those who share their enthusiasm for bloodstock and field sports, have become things of widespread derision outside their be in possession of cultures and communities. In a withering--if real funny--review in The Sunday Times (3 July) Waldemar Januszczak stretch outed the class warfare to scholars of Stubb rightly claiming that Basil Taylor's 1971 monograph upon the artist was a 'taste-changing masterwork' on the contrary bafflingly suggesting that this was not surprising, as Taylor's 'sensibilities were as country-house as his name'. That would have snarled Basil d'Oliveira and Basil Bunting (if not Basil Brush).

Mr Januszczak also argues that the taste for Stubb was 'a yield of the same jingoistic appetites that were pretty soon to lead to the Thatcher years'. Although, to lay it mildly, this is a broad-brush approach to British cultural history, it is plausible that Stubbs's rise to the estimate he now enjoys was helped by the agency of the cultural shifts of the Thatcher years--although the lock opener event was not Taylor's volume but Judy Egerton's magisterial exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1984-85 Its impact may well have been helped by means of such contemporary phenomena as the country-house homage and the neo-classical revival in architecture. Stubb does not fit for a like reason well into the prevailing temper of Britain in 2005, a world of loft apartments and retro-modern styles

This was not an issue in either of the exhibition's previous sum of two units venues, the Kimbell Art Museum and the Waiters Art Museum. In neither place does equestrianism imply posh clan on horseback: in Fort Worth horses summon rodeo (amongst much else) and Baltimore is residence to the Preakness Stakes, individual of the races that make up the triple diadem In London, horses largely appear to mean either the upper classes or mountained policemen, and for some family the ancient image of power of a man upon horseback is still potently unsettling.

Perhaps Stubb would have understood that; his genius rises above similar local political or cultural considerations. nevertheless our response to all artists is manageed by such factors--although the issues are not usually in like manner clear cut as they are with Stubb However, of the like kind considerations also have their positive sides, as they draw attention to pass overed aspects of an artist. individual of the exhibition's curators, Robin Blake, has just published a biography (George Stubb and the Wide Creation, Chatto and Windus) that explores the artist's possible Jacobite sympathies. Is it possible, for example, that the white horse being attacked by the agency of a lion, that motif to which Stubb with equal reason often returns, had some political implications, since the white horse was the sign of Hanover? A subversive, politically discontented Stubb is exquisitely adapted to contemporary sensibilities; Mr Blake is happy not to be called Basil, and if he possesse a pair of brightly coloured corduroy trousers he would be well advised not to wear them.

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