George Stubbs And The Wide Creation

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 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.

Translation, illustration and interpretation have at least two things in common. They all begin when sense is made in the act of reading: that is where illustrative images and explanatory words begin to form. And they all ask to be understood in relation to the works from which they have arisen: reading them is a matter of reading readings. Likenesses explores this palimpsestic realm, with examples from Dante to the contemporary sculptor Rachel Whiteread. The complexities that emerge are different from Empsonian ambiguity or de Man's unknowable infinity of signification: here, meaning dawns and fades as the hologrammic text is filled out and flattened by successive encounters. Since all literature and art is palimpsestic to some degree - Reynolds proposes - this style of interpretation can become a tactic for criticism in general. Critics need both to indulge and to distrust the metamorphic power of their interpreting imaginations. Likenesses follows on from the argument of Reynolds's The Poetry of Translation (2011), extending it through other translations and beyond them into a wide range of layered texts. Browning emerges as a key figure because his poems laminate languages, places, times and modes of utterance with such compelling energy. There are also substantial, innovative accounts of Dryden, Stubbs, Goya, Turner, Tennyson, Ungaretti and many more.

This dictionary consists of over 3000 entries on a range of British artists, from medieval manuscript illuminators to contemporary cartoonists. Its core is comprised of the entries focusing on British graphic artists and illustrators from the '2006 Benezit Dictionary of Artists' with an additional 90 revised and 60 new articles.

Examining a wide range of works, from Gulliver's Travels to The Hunger Games, Representing the Modern Animal in Culture employs key theoretical apparatuses of Animal Studies to literary texts. Contributors address the multifarious modes of animal representation and the range of human-animal interactions that have emerged in the past 300 years.

This radical reinterpretation of Ottoman and Arab influences on horsemanship and breeding sheds new light on English national identity, as illustrated in such classic works as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and George Stubbs's portrait of Whistlejacket.

How do our senses help us to understand the world? This question, which preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers, also emerged as a key theme in depictions of animals in eighteenth-century art. This book examines the ways in which painters such as Chardin, as well as sculptors, porcelain modelers, and other decorative designers portrayed animals as sensing subjects who physically confirmed the value of material experience. The sensual style known today as the Rococo encouraged the proliferation of animals as exemplars of empirical inquiry, ranging from the popular subject of the monkey artist to the alchemical wonders of the life-sized porcelain animals created for the Saxon court. Examining writings on sensory knowledge by La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot and other philosophers side by side with depictions of the animal in art, Cohen argues that artists promoted the animal as a sensory subject while also validating the material basis of their own professional practice.

During the 18th century medicine became an autonomous discipline and practice. Surgeons justified themselves as skilled practitioners and set themselves apart from the unspecialized, hack barber-surgeons of early modernity. This title presents 17 essays on the relationship between medicine and literature during the Enlightenment.