Surely George Stubbs can’t have recalled his own birth? In his icily brilliant illustrations for a book on midwifery, the 18th-century artist and anatomist depicts the process of delivering a child. Compressed and twisted babies lie in dissected wombs, or aim their heads at a narrow pelvic opening. Is it too much to see – in this uncomfortable study of birth – the early autobiography of this curious genius?
While Stubbs may not have been recalling his own birth, it’s worth pointing out that John Burton, the author of the midwifery book, is the model for Dr Slop in Tristram Shandy. The narrator of Laurence Sterne’s madcap 1759 novel actually does remember how he came into the world – starting with his conception. So it’s fitting that this uneasily beautiful survey of Stubbs begins with images of what Sterne called the little human “homunculus”.
Stubbs was born in 1724 in Liverpool, then a thriving centre of the slave trade. This is not usually seen as relevant to the career of an artist who specialised in painting horses. But the first thing you notice in this show is the clinical irony with which Stubbs saw the hierarchies of English society.
People don’t come off well in his portraits. Sir Henry Nelthorpe and his Second Wife Elizabeth, painted by the young Stubbs in about 1748, look waxy and dead. Nelthorpe’s face is lumpen under his pompous wig and his wife’s expression subdued. No wonder Stubbs decided to study anatomy and paint animals instead – he’d never have made it as a human portraitist.
But it’s a question of attitude, not skill. His animal scenes abound in details that reveal his disdain for the human order. In a 1776 painting, Sir John Nelthorpe poses with his gun and dogs on an estate that rolls away under an empty sky, his face an inexpressive mask of authority. By contrast, it is grooms, jockeys and servants whom Stubbs seems to like, for they show sensitivity to animals. Mr Cobb, the groom responsible for the famous racehorse Whistlejacket, gently caresses his charge in a painting that celebrates this otherwise forgotten servant.
The most jaundiced view of humans here is a 1793 group portrait, Soldiers of the 10th Light Dragoons, in which a serjeant on horseback looms over three men who stand stiffly at attention. They look like toy soldiers. One is fat, two are thin, all have soft bland faces. This is how Stubbs sees humanity – absurdly costumed, pointlessly regimented. In a word: enslaved.
Only animals are free. You can whip them, but their wildness will out – sometimes in the most unexpectedly delicate ways. In his 1765 work A Cheetah and a Stag with Two Human Attendants, a predatory cat refuses to behave as predicted. It’s a true story: a cheetah was set on a stag in Windsor Park but showed no interest in chasing it. Stubbs sees this as a sublime moment when we sense the nervous complex inner life of a big cat. Its face is proud and self-possessed in its uncooperative stillness. By contrast the two animal handlers urging it to kill are unfree. They’ve been brought from India and told to wear “native” costume for this bloody show. The power relations of empire contrast with the autonomy of a killer cat that refuses to kill on cue.
Stubbs wasn’t the first person in his century to speculate on the superior souls of other species. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726 when Stubbs was two, the hapless sailor Gulliver meets a race of ultra-civilised horses called Houyhnhnms. Their name sounds like a neigh but they speak eloquently and wisely – unlike their enemies, the filthy, savage Yahoos, that is, human beings. When Gulliver gets home to Britain, he is – like Stubbs – alienated by the Yahoos all around him.
The greatest works in this exhibition are portraits of gentle Houyhnhnms. Whistlejacket, lent by the National Gallery, is rightly renowned for its lifesized depiction of a rearing thoroughbred gazing back at us from an eye that’s full of feeling. But two paintings made for the same patron, the Marquess of Rockingham, also use the same radical conceit: the horses are shown in empty olive-toned space with no scenery to distract from their chestnut beauty.
In one long, low painting designed to look like a classical Roman frieze, Mr Cobb looks after Whistlejacket. In Mares and Foals with an Unfigured Background, Stubbs lets us watch a tender, shy community of horses as they show a delicacy and kindness to each other that’s lacking from his pictures of regimented soldiers, formal marriages and subdued silent labourers.
Foals suck at the teats of long-maned mothers in an idyll of happy equine childhood. Stubbs would rather be one of those foals than a human baby pulled out by forceps to face a servile destiny. This is one of Stubbs’s masterpieces – the equal of Whistlejacket. It takes us to the free and happy land of the Houyhnhnms, far from those English Yahoos.
• George Stubbs: all done from Nature is at MK Gallery until 26 January.
