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George Stubbs was born in 1724 in Liverpool and he was the son of a currier. He had little formal training in art although he was briefly a pupil of Sir Godfrey Kneller's assistant Hamlet Winstanley. This training was enough to set himself up as a portrait painter where he worked in Wigan. He was very interested in human anatomyand studied at the York County Hospital and he know enough about anatomy to give private lessons to medical students. In 1751 he was comissioned to illustrate a book on midwifery by Dr John Burton.
In 1754 he went to Rome to reaffirm that his belief that nature was superior to art and although he did have a great liking of Italian art when he died some Italian works were found in his collection. Whilst in Italy he became intrigued by the marble horse attacked by a lion in the courtyard of the Palazzo Senatorio in Rome. The author suggests that this is where his several paintings on this theme originated.
A Lion Attacking a Horse (oil on canvas) 1762
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In 1756 he fathers a son George Townley Stubbs by Mary Spencer his common-law wife. In 1750 the Jockey Club was and the breeding and training of racehorses became fashionable. So in 17 58 Stubbs began to study the anatomy of horses in a farm house in Horkstow near Lincolnshire. He used dead and decaying horses to disect and reconstruct skeletons in his quest to understand the anatomy more thoroughly. He did all his own engravings for a book called simply the Anatomy of the Horse and this enabled him to produce paintings of unsurpassed accuracy far exceeding his predessors James Seymour or John Wootton.
Stubbs by William Gaunt Phaidon Press Limited 1977
Diagram from the Anatomy of the Horse
Whistlejacket was his most famous work and changes convention by having a plain background
George Stubbs also painted exotic animals such as giraffs, lions, monkeys, tigers and rhinoceroses which he observed from private menageries. He died at the age of 81 yrs on 10th July 1806
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_StubbsStubbs's contribution througj the Anatomy of the Horse was an important piece of research and was vital to the understanding of the stucture of the horse. The knowledge of skeletal and muscle placing defines the shape of the horse. The horse's coat in his paintings is short so the muscle and skeletal definition show through and the accuracy of his work is unchallenged. He also added individualism to his horses as they all seem to have different expressions such as in the Mares and Foals painting
Mares and Foals without a background 1762
The most expensive Stubbs painting recently sold was Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath with a Trainer and Stable Lad and a Jockey at Christies International in London on July 5th 2011 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stubbs
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