George Stubbs

George Stubbs is one of the greatest of British eighteenth-century painters, with a deep and unaffected sympathy for country life and the English countryside. This fully illustrated book outlines his career, followed by a catalogue raisonne (the first since Sir Walter Gilbey's short listing of 1898) of all his known works. One of the stickiest labels in the history of British art attached itself to Stubbs as 'Mr Stubbs the horse painter'. Over half of his paintings were of horses, each founded on the pioneering observations assembled (in 1766) in his book The Anatomy of the Horse; but Stubbs's wide-ranging subjects included portraits, conversation pieces and paintings of exotic animals from the Zebra to the Rhinoceros, as well as an extraordinarily sympathetic series of portraits of dogs.

This masterpiece of animal anatomy contains 36 plates that reproduce Stubbs' etchings. Based on the artist's own dissections and outline views, the illustrations feature extensive explanatory text. Full reproduction of 1766 edition.

A portrait of the painter presents his celebrated horse images and explores his fascination with anatomy and dissection, as well as his erratic relationship with the establishment.

Far more than a fine horse portraitist, George Stubbs was a painter and a printmaker of the highest importance, on a par with his great contemporaries, Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough. An artist-scientist who emulated Leonardo da Vinci, Stubbs tirelessly explored the natural world, and new ways of representing it. Born the son of a Liverpool tradesman, Stubbs was self-taught and at first struggled in obscurity as a northern provincial painter. Robin Blake's book uncovers Stubbs's origins and some of the secrets of his youth: sympathy with the Jacobite rebels and Catholicism; and a previously undocumented wife and family in York. A 'niece', Mary, became his mistress and lifelong companion, working alongside him as he dissected the carcasses of horses. In 1776 he published these investigations as The Anatomy of the Horse, which was his breakthrough, leading to commissions from the most powerful men in Georgian Britain. By tracing the network of patronage and friendship through which George Stubbs operated, Robin Blake reveals the remarkable succession of animals, people and ideas which inspired him. Stubbs emerges as a man of huge energy and complex sensibility whose artistry was informed by science, politics, literature, classical art and - above all - nature itself.

George Stubbs was one of the most original artists Britain ever produced. His extraordinary dedication to accuracy impelled him to spend 18 solitary months dissecting and drawing horses to make his landmark study, The Anatomy of the Horse. His portraits of people and animals combine an unflinchingly accurate gaze with profound psychological truth, yet he also created some of the most lyrical paintings of the age. Ozias Humphry, a colleague of Stubbs, recorded his many conversations with the painter, and the resulting manuscript became the basis for this present book.

George Stubbs: 'all done from Nature' presents the first significant overview of Stubbs's work in Britain for more than 10 years and brings together 100 paintings, drawings and publications, from the National Gallery's Whistlejacket to pieces that have never been seen in public. George Stubbs: 'all done from Nature' accompanies an exhibition organised by MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, which will be shown at MK Gallery and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The publication includes new writing on Stubbs with major essays by Jenny Uglow, Martin Myrone, Martin Postle and Nicholas Clee as well as new and existing poetry by Roger Robinson. Born in Liverpool in 1724, Stubbs was a quintessential product of the Enlightenment and embodied all of its core principles, questioning traditional authority and embracing the notion that humanity could be improved through the application of reason. Rather than trust to history and the untested example of his artistic and scientific precursors, Stubbs championed doing as a way of thinking and deployed pictorial representation as a form of knowledge and understanding. Today, Stubbs is recognised as one of the most original artists of the eighteenth century. His wide-ranging subjects included portraits, conversation pieces and pictures of exotic and domestic animals--horses included--and his obsession with scientific exactitude has drawn comparison with the work of Leonardo da Vinci. A major theme of the exhibition is anatomy. The show includes Stubbs's contributions to a pioneering treatise on midwifery and his preliminary work on A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl. It also includes the detailed studies and drawings that led to The Anatomy of the Horse--the greatest coming together of art and science in British art--alongside the actual skeleton of the legendary racehorse Eclipse who Stubbs depicted on several occasions.