George Stubbs
1724-1806
George Stubbs Galleries
George Stubbs (born in Liverpool on August 25, 1724 ?C died in London July 10, 1806) was a British painter, best known for his paintings of horses.
Stubbs was the son of a currier. Information on his life up to age thirty-five is sparse, relying almost entirely on notes made by fellow artist Ozias Humphry towards the end of Stubbs's life. Stubbs was briefly apprenticed to a Lancashire painter and engraver named Hamlet Winstanley, but soon left as he objected to the work of copying to which he was set. Thereafter as an artist he was self-taught. In the 1740s he worked as a portrait painter in the North of England and from about 1745 to 1751 he studied human anatomy at York County Hospital. He had had a passion for anatomy from his childhood, and one of his earliest surviving works is a set of illustrations for a textbook on midwifery which was published in 1751.
In 1755 Stubbs visited Italy. Forty years later he told Ozias Humphry that his motive for going to Italy was, "to convince himself that nature was and is always superior to art whether Greek or Roman, and having renewed this conviction he immediately resolved upon returning home". Later in the 1754 he rented a farmhouse in the village of Horkstow,Lincolnshire, and spent 18 months dissecting horses. He moved to London in about 1759 and in 1766 published The anatomy of the Horse. The original drawings are now in the collection of the Royal Academy.
Even before his book was published, Stubbs's drawings were seen by leading aristocratic patrons, who recognised that his work was more accurate than that of earlier horse painters such as James Seymour and John Wootton. In 1759 the 3rd Duke of Richmond commissioned three large pictures from him, and his career was soon secure. By 1763 he had produced works for several more dukes and other lords and was able to buy a house in Marylebone, a fashionable part of London, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Whistlejacket. National Gallery, London.His most famous work is probably Whistlejacket, a painting of a prancing horse commissioned by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, which is now in the National Gallery in London. This and two other paintings carried out for Rockingham break with convention in having plain backgrounds. Throughout the 1760s he produced a wide range of individual and group portraits of horses, sometimes accompanied by hounds. He often painted horses with their grooms, whom he always painted as individuals. Meanwhile he also continued to accept commissions for portraits of people, including some group portraits. From 1761 to 1776 he exhibited at the Society of Artists, but in 1775 he switched his allegiance to the recently founded but already more prestigious Royal Academy.
Stubbs also painted more exotic animals including lions, tigers, giraffes, monkeys, and rhinoceroses, which he was able to observe in private menageries. He became preoccupied with the theme of a wild horse threatened by a lion and produced several variations on this theme. These and other works became well known at the time through engravings of Stubbs's work, which appeared in increasing numbers in the 1770s and 1780s.
Mares and Foals in a Landscape. 1763-68.Stubbs also painted historical pictures, but these are much less well regarded. From the late 1760s he produced some work on enamel. In the 1770s Josiah Wedgwood developed a new and larger type of enamel panel at Stubbs's request. Also in the 1770s he painted single portraits of dogs for the first time, while also receiving an increasing number of commissions to paint hunts with their packs of hounds. He remained active into his old age. In the 1780s he produced a pastoral series called Haymakers and Reapers, and in the early 1790s he enjoyed the patronage of the Prince of Wales, whom he painted on horseback in 1791. His last project, begun in 1795, was A comparative anatomical exposition of the structure of the human body with that of a tiger and a common fowl, engravings from which appeared between 1804 and 1806.
Stubbs's son George Townly Stubbs was an engraver and printmaker. Related Paintings of George Stubbs :. | Stuten und Fohlen in einer Flublandschaft | A Lion Attacking a Horse | Self-Portrait on a White Hunter | Otho,with JOhn Larkin up | Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians | Related Artists: VOS, Marten deFlemish painter (b. 1532, Antwerpen, d. 1603, Antwerpen).
Flemish painter and draughtsman. Together with the brothers Ambrosius Francken I and Frans Francken I, he ranks among the most important painters of altarpieces in Antwerp during the 1590s. Due, in part, to the Counter-Reformation, there was a renewed demand for altarpieces to replace those lost during iconoclastic riots in 1566 or the reformist movement of 1581. De Vos produced works for, among others, the Old Crossbowmen, the Brabant Coiners, the Antonites, the wine merchants and the Guild of St Luke. The importance of these works would seem to suggest that, after the deaths of Pieter Bruegel I in 1569 and Frans Floris in 1570, de Vos was considered, with some justification, the most important figure painter in Antwerp before Rubens. He was also a prolific draughtsman, especially during the first half of the 1580s, when the Calvinists were in power in Antwerp. During this period he provided numerous designs for print publishers, such as Peeter Baltens, Frans van Beusecom, the widow of Hieronymus Cock, Adriaen Collaert, Phillip Galle, Willem van Haecht, Eduard van Hoeswinkel, Gerard de Jode, Hans van Luyck and Johannes Baptista Vrints. This increased activity is probably indicative of the economic recession and a dwindling market for paintings (especially of religious themes). A total of some 1600 prints were produced after designs by de Vos, an output three times that of Maarten van Heemskerck. De Vos's drawings have been praised (see Mielke) for their lively, impressionist painter1882-1885 kathe kollwitzGerman Expressionist Printmaker and Sculptor, 1867-1945,was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities.
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