Art: Noble Corral

The Commonwealth of Virginia has seen its share of dramatic horse shows in the past 300 years, but none has ever involved so much high-powered sponsorship as the one now going on in Richmond. Director Leslie Cheek Jr. of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts first began working on it back in 1954, when two sporting gentlemen on his board of trustees fell to talking about their favorite subject. Trustee Paul Mellon agreed to help raise the money, and both President Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth were signed on as honorary patrons. Gradually—from the stately homes of England, the châteaux and museums of France, the great art collections of the U.S.—the noble steeds were assembled. The result: as rich a display of paintings as any lover of horses—or of good portraiture—could want.

It was inevitable that in this kind of exhibition England would carry the day. Only one American, Swiss-born Edward Troye, who died in 1874, was considered eligible to hang with the masters. Though France is represented by some of its most illustrious names, the fact remains that for such artists as Daumier, Degas and Manet, art always came in first, and horses only showed. But in England, from Charles II to Elizabeth II, the sovereign has been a patron of the turf (two of the exhibition’s paintings came from the Royal Collection), and the commissioning of portraits was once almost as much a part of a horseman’s way of life as racing or breeding or hunting. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the golden age of such art, painter after painter recorded England’s placid world of privilege, where the horses often seemed to outrank the people. But of all the painters, none ever matched the horses of George Stubbs (see color).

Adventures at Night. At the age of eight. George had an obvious talent—and a curiously gruesome way of developing it. The son of a Liverpool leather dresser, young Stubbs would borrow human bones from a physician in the neighborhood and take them home to sketch. By the time he was 22, he was a lecturer on anatomy in York, and one account delicately hints that he was a body snatcher (“A hundred times he ran into such adventures at night as would subject anyone with less honorable motives to the greatest severity of the law”).

He was a man of such vigor and strength that some admirers swore he once carried a dead horse up three flights of stairs to be dissected. He had a common-law wife and an illegitimate son, who piously reported the poignant fact that in the 40 years before his death in 1806, at the age of 79, George Stubbs never had a drink of anything but water. Aside from that, little is known about him—except that at his peak he could command a higher price for the portrait of a horse than Sir Joshua Reynolds charged for an earl. There was good reason for his success: his landscapes could be as elegantly dead as any man’s, but when he painted animals, every muscle flared with life, and every sinew danced.

Down to the Bone. How did Stubbs learn his art? One contemporary described a scene that took place in a farmhouse in Lincolnshire. “The first subject that [Stubbs] prepared was a horse which was bled to death by the jugular vein. A Bar of Iron was then suspended from the ceiling . . . and the animal was suspended to the iron bar. [Stubbs] first began by dissecting the muscles of the abdomen proceeding thro five different layers … Then he proceeded to dissect the head … he made careful designs and wrote the explanation which usually employed him a whole day. He then took off another layer of muscles . . . and so proceeded until he came to the skeleton.”