THE GREATNESS OF GEORGE STUBBS
The Anatomy of the Horse. By George Stubbs. With a Modern Paraphrase by Professor J. C. McGunn, M.R.C.V.S., M.R.C.P., L.R.C.P., assisted by C. W. Ottaway, M.R.C.V.S. (Heywood Hill. 42s.) GEORGE &muss is one of the artists whom it is difficult to appreciate because their pictures are hard to see. His best pictures are nearly all of them in private collections. Though he painted a good many other things—human beings, tigers, monkeys, kangaroos, landscapes—he painted horses chiefly, and so with a slight sneer he goes down into books of reference as a horse-painter. Now, if a painter is a horse-painter whose pictures are hidden away in noblemen's houses, it is pretty certain that he will be neglected, or despised, or patronised by the historians of art. That is absolutely what has happened to Stubbs. Even in the last thirty years, no one has been just to him, from Roger Fry to Mr. Wilenski (who has, though, some idea of his importance); and yet he was an artist who correctly understood the relation of subject to design, who felt in three dimensions, and got beyond the unreasoning amateurism of English art.
At the present time, the formal and realistic excellence of his work should be liked and understood. It is certainly
dear enough in The Anatomy of the Horse. Stubbs was a scientific painter, a naturalist, and -this is a scientific and naturalistic book. Stubbs began to learn anatomy when he
was a child. Before he went to Rome in 1754, to convince himself that " Nature is superior to all art," he had made a reputation among the doctors at York as a very skilful anatomist. It is worth looking at the plates he engraved for An Essay Towards a Complete New System of Midwifery, written by Dr. John Burton, of York (the Doctor Slop in Tristram Shandy), and published in 1751. To make these drawings he dissected women who had died in childbirth.
He was already an established painter when he began on The Anatomy of the Horse in a Lincolnshire farmhouse. He lived there alone with his mistress in a continual smell of putrefaction. Each horse he bled to death by opening the jugular vein. He then rigged up the body on great meat- hooks which hung down from a bar. The hooks went into the ribs on the far side of the horse (one went in under the backbone), so that he could get to work on stripping the near side free of interference. Each horse hung there, in various stages from hide to skeleton, for six or seven weeks.
The dissection and the drawings took him 18 months and he spent another six or seven years, working at night after his bread-and-butter painting was done, engraving the plates. The Anatomy was finally printed and published in 1766.
It became then, and it has remained ever since, a famous book. But it has been more appreciated as a work of veterinary and anatomical accuracy than as a series of very remarkable and very lovely engravings. In this new reprint, I am afraid, the power has gone out of the plates. The ink used is too brown. The very fine lines by which Stubbs built up the solidity of limb and flesh and muscle and liga- ment and artery and bone are often weakened or blurred or missing, and light and dark no longer contrast sometimes with their original boldness and drama. Also the publishers have made the book an upright, instead of an oblong, folio. The large plates fold in the middle and other engravings are now divided by a page from the outline " keys " which went with them. This is serious because Stubbs, who was not a clumsy artist, knew exactly how to place a figure inside the dimensions of a page. To keep the figure and change the page is all wrong, and his original disposition ought to have been used again at all costs.
One thing which made the plates so effective is that Stubbs never engraved anything but a horse which seems alive.
Whether he has cut down to the muscles, to the arteries, or to the bone, the horse is always represented as a lively, powerful animal, usually in movement. It has always the full solidity and exactitude and tenseness of life, and in conse- quence each engraving is a work of science and of art. Even the animated, macabre and exact skeletons are caught moving across the page. And Stubbs joined expressiveness to scientific accuracy by the way he posed, no less than by the way he animated, the horses. The rhythm of line and mass is nearly always delightful. Hoof is placed against hoof, for example, in a way that Stubbs learnt from Poussin. I think the results of looking as much at Poussin as at Nature are clear in all of Stubbs's finest pictures—for instance, in The Third Duke of Portland and Lord Edward Bentinck at the lumping Bars (1767), which is reproduced in this new edition. I mention Poussin, because it must not be held at all that Stubbs was an uneducated painter. He had studied the col- lection at Knowsley when he was a boy. He had looked at art as well as Nature when he was in Rome (where he had dealings with Richard Wilson). He was intimate with Paul Sandby and his friends. He was a leading member of the Society of Artists. He was, in fact, an educated, sensitive and sophisticated painter, with a very unusual knowledge and a lust for truth which linked him to the artists of the Renaissance and separated him from most of the English artists, though not from the real temper, of his own time. His horse pictures and genre pictures seldom degenerate into mere portraiture and never, I think, into anecdotes. In severity and purity of design—witness The lumping Bars or The Phaeton in the National Gallery—based always upon a knowledge of things, I am convinced that Stubbs is not excelled by any other English painter.
But he needs rescuing. He needs rescuing, I am bound to say, from the noblemen and the horsemen who have enjoyed him almost exclusively for so long. Stubbs addressed himself in the preface of The Anatomy of the Horse to: (i) Artists, (ii) Farriers and horse-doctors, (iii) Gentlemen who breed horses : but in this reprint the order, as usual, is reversed. It is a nobleman's reprint, supervised by an eminent horse-doctor. It is dedicated to the Duke of Portland, who contributes a letter to Professor McGunn and a photograph of a statuette of his famous horse, St. Simon, by Sir Edgar Boehm. One page is occupied with " Authoritative Opinions of Today," which are those of Lord Astor and the Duke of Beaufort, with art—of a kind—coming in at the tail from Mr. Lionel Edwards of Punch, and Mr. A. J. Munnings of the Academy (who commits two errors of fact without risking a criticism of elementary value or interest). The biographical note is inaccurate as well and says only what was known already ; and there are also the faults which 1 have mentioned before.
What someone might do now—in retribution—is to reprint Stubbs's third anatomical book, which is nearly unknown, and which is in some ways still more remarkable. This is The Anatomy of the Human Body and the Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Tiger and the Fowl, left unfinished when he died and published eleven years later in 1817 with a dozen folio engravings. There is one very dramatic plate in this rare book of a plucked rooster striding along with a full comb and a cold, beady eye. Like the skeleton plates in The Anatomy of the Horse, it proves that Stubbs's imagination had something in common with the Gothicism of Fuseli and Blake as well as with the scientific naturalism of Gainsborough and Constable, and, if you like, Poussin.
GEOFFREY GRIGSON.
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