Art: Paddock Portraitist

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At painting horses, his specialty over a career of more than 50 years, 18th Century English Artist George Stubbs was never headed by any other in the field. For a lot of Londoners last week, Stubbs's life-size portrait of the great English race horse, Hambletonian,* ran away with a big show of Royal Academy masterpieces. Alongside the drawing-room elegance of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence, Stubbs's picture of two grooms rubbing down the champion seemed as pleasantly direct and fresh as a breeze from green grass. Opined Daily Mail Critic Pierre Jeanneret: "The noblest picture of a horse ever done."

Stubbs's noble conception of horseflesh was based on painstaking, back-breaking labor. Born in 1724, when the study of zoology was still rudimentary, he rented an isolated farm in Lincolnshire, and bought up a series of horse cadavers. Disregarding their gamy condition, he propped them upright with a series of bars and hooks, which allowed him to adjust the position of the legs to simulate motion. Then he dissected them muscle by muscle. After 18 months of study and a set of minutely detailed drawings, his curiosity was satisfied. One result of his studies, an elaborate tome entitled The Anatomy of the Horse, was a landmark for artists and veterinarians alike.

Stubbs's diligent studies paid off in other ways. As England's recognized authority on horses, he was swamped with commissions from hard-riding country gentlemen for portraits of their favorite mounts. They were rarely disappointed. Such Stubbs champions as the Marquis of Rockingham's yellow sorrel, Whistlejacket, or the handsome grey, Gimcrack, are not only first-class paintings, but display an accuracy of detail that the most critical stableman still finds unexceptionable.

Stubbs's curiosity was not limited to horses. He was a qualified medical lecturer on human anatomy, did the technical illustrations for his friend Dr. John Burton's Essay Towards a Complete New System of Midwifery. He was a vigorous 75 when he executed his 7-by-12-ft. canvas of Hambletonian, after the horse's last triumphant win at Newmarket. Seven years later Stubbs died; his final ambitious project, half finished at his death, was to have been 30 anatomical tables contrasting the structure of the human body with that of the tiger and the fowl.