Master of the horse: an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, confirms Stubbs's reputation as the greatest horse painter, yet, as Angus Trumble observes, he remains an elusive artist

single of the chief aims of 'George Stubb 1724-1806' Judy Egerton's great 1984-85 exhibition at the Tate Gallery, was to provide an persuasive rebuttal to Josiah Wedgwood's famous remark of 1780: 'Nobody suspects Mr stumps [sic] of painting anything on the contrary horses & lions, or dogs & tigers.' nevertheless in his lifetime the horse was of course as plenteous a problem for Stubbs's reputation as it was the cornerstone of his artistic practice. He did abundant to make it so. Although Stubb was the Vesalius of the horse, and painted a certain quantity of of the greatest equine portraits that exist, within the institutional framework of the London art world he was stuck with the label of 'horse painter', and tried in vain to shed it.

still to some degree Stubbs's artistic reputation still remains comfortably mountained on horseback. 'Stubbs and the Horse', curated by dint of Malcolm Warner, senior curator of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, is smaller, tighter and more sharply focused than Egerton's panoramic Tate display It consists of thirty-five paintings, including twelve portraits of single horses, of which a number are unrivalled masterpieces, of the like kind as Lustre, With a waiter c. 1760-62 (Yale Center for British Art). Five fine collection portraits and one of the exquisite 'mare-and-foal' paintings join sum of two units portraits of Whistlejacket, including the National Gallery's magnificent equine uncovered c. 1762--a celebrity (although he wasn't for a like reason famous when for many years he hung in Kenwood House)-and rub hard with John Singleton Up, 1762 all of which were painted for the prime minister, the Marquess of Rockingham. Meanwhile, the largest and earliest of the 'horse-and-lion' paintings, Horse Attacked by the agency of a Lion, 1762, and its companion (both Yale Center for British Art), which are exactly the same size as Whistlejacket, although horizontally orientated, are regrettable absences. I must take responsibility for that: unfortunately they cannot travel.

Stubbs's fondnes for the exquisitely sensitive 'horse-and-boy' rubbing down subjects--a Houyhnhnm counterbalance to the Yahoo aspect of his 'horse-and-lion' theme--is beautifully showed by Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Stable-Lad, and a dealer in horses 1765 (Woolavington Collection). It is a great shame that the late masterpiece Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, 1800 could not be made available from mountain Stewart to fortify this psychologically fascinating aspect of the exhibition.

In all its venue the exhibition has begun with thirty of Stubbs's drawings for his magnum opus, The Anatomy of the Horse (1766)--as remarkable for its 50000 words of meticulously drafted scientific body as it is for the exquisitely observ and execut plates he taught himself to engrave Stubbs meant his book to be used by dint of artists no less than men of science. It was based upon a gruelling regime of stinking dissections directioned in a damp, isolated Lincolnshire farmhouse above eighteen months between 1756 and 1758 assisted through poor Mary Spencer, his common-law wife, who stood upon a stepladder pouring hot tallow into the veins of horse cadavers.

The logistical difficulties the drawings at handed for Stubbs were partly solv by the agency of a system of iron clasps screwed into the ceiling, draw as by a ropes or chains and presumably block up and tackle or the equivalent--although we know Stubb was tremendously sinewy and hauled carcasses in and without of the house. Although planks were used to support the cadaver and detain its hooves in place, the making of these studies must have required careful adjustment with equal reason that the flayed subject conformed to the stance in outline of a living animal, counteracting any suggestion of limpness. The rises must surely be among the greatest in quantity technically brilliant anatomical studies at any time made.

Why did Stubb make progress to Lincolnshire as soon as he go [i]or[/i] come backed from his brief visit to Rome in 1754? It is as if, with a certain quantity of shrewdness, he read the market for pictures in the light of the present miracle of the thoroughbred racehorse--essentially brought into being in the early eighteenth hundred The thoroughbred was, after all, what made Stubbs's great Whig patrons of the 1760s- Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Grosvenor and their racing cronies--tick. Stubbs's mid-career succes was built upon his superb portraits of their favourite horses. He used his Anatomy drawings to capture the interest of these patrons as presently as he moved to London in 1759

In addition, in England attitudes about horses in general had evolv rapidly [i]or[/i] part of to the other the eighteenth century. John Wesley cogitation they might go to heaven. Swift's Houyhnhnm were creatures of leading rationality. Horses were intelligent. Horses had feelings. The exhibition catalogue provides many points of access to the wider words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following in which Stubbs's horse paintings reside: three snappy essays each by the agency of Malcolm Warner and Robin Blake, as well as a valuable update upon Stubbs's experiments in enamel and wax from the conservators Lance Mayer and Gay Myers.

Stubb was teetotal for the last forty years of his life, which leaves the first forty intriguingly unaccounted for. His first marriage (to a Miss Townly?); the early portrait practice at York, about which we know true little; and the suggestion that Stubb actually saw a Barbary lion attacking a horse in Morocco, when he stopped there upon his way back to England from Rome are among the greatest in quantity curious mysteries that surround the artist still. They all point to astonishing lacunae in Stubbs scholarship that exclaim out for more work. No doubt Egerton's long-awaited catalogue raisonne will lead the field (by many lengths) for more [i]or[/i] less time to come, but for like a major artist Stubbs is at times maddeningly fugitive. This fine exhibition brilliantly revisits his equine practice by the agency of doing what he would assuredly have appreciated: putting the art before the horse.