Art history? No, we're starting this month with an exhibition that we'll be tagging #artherstory on social media. Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 opens at Tate Britain in London on May 16, with the aim of charting the path of women to being recognised as professional artists over the centuries. More than 100 will be represented: relatively widely known names such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman , Gwen John and Laura Knight , as well as the more obscure or neglected -- Levina Teerlinc, Mary Beale and Sarah Biffin . It's on till October 13, and as we've just seen a show in Germany focused on women artists over much the same timescale, we'll be keen to compare and contrast. Let's stick with a female theme. A short stroll up Millbank and across Lambeth Bridge, and you're at the Garden Museum, where from May 15 to September 29 you can see Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors . The show takes you around the gardens of Vane
George Stubbs was the greatest painter of animals in British art. There's probably not much doubt about that. Just how much effort he put into achieving that status is demonstrated in an excellent exhibition, George Stubbs: 'All Done from Nature', in the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes.
We'll get back to Stubbs very shortly, but just in case you're thinking Milton Keynes is an odd place to go for a big art show, you'd be wrong, because the MK Gallery has recently been extended and boasts an impressively large exhibition space -- and an ambitious programme. This is the first big Stubbs overview in three decades, and the curators have assembled pictures from a wide range of lenders, the sort you tend not to pop into for a look at their paintings, like the Jockey Club and the Royal Veterinary College.
Oh, and there's Whistlejacket, too, Stubbs's most famous, most impressive achievement.
You can see Whistlejacket there on the back wall, released from his normal stabling at the National Gallery, and in front of him is the skeleton of another celebrated racehorse Stubbs also painted, Eclipse. So named because he was foaled during a total eclipse of the sun in 1764, Eclipse was highly strung but he was unbeaten in 18 races in his career. Put out to stud, Eclipse sired three Derby winners, and more than 100 of his descendants have won the race.
Here's Stubbs's painting of Eclipse after a race at Newmarket, in front of the rubbing-down house, where horses were cleaned after races.
Eclipse was outstanding enough to warrant a post-mortem when he died in 1789, an event that helped lead to the foundation of the Royal Veterinary College and the preservation of his skeleton. And it was scientific investigation that helped Stubbs to the unequalled precision of his representation of horses.
From 1756 to 1758 Stubbs spent 18 months dissecting the bodies of up to a dozen horses on a farm in Lincolnshire and drawing the various stages of dissection in great detail for a book called The Anatomy of the Horse, which drew widespread praise when it was published in the following decade. Muscles, veins, arteries, nerves: All was minutely recorded. You can see the drawings on the walls around the skeleton of Eclipse, and they are truly astonishing.
Stubbs had in fact carried on such work from early in his career. At the start of this exhibition, glass cases contain some astounding illustrations he made in his mid-20s for a book on midwifery, including studies of the foetus in the womb. Stubbs created the plates for the book from his own drawings, having taught himself how to do so from scratch. A Leonardo-like mind at work here.
It was such painstaking working methods that enabled Stubbs to recreate horses on canvas more accurately than anyone before -- "all done from nature," as he said. These are individual portraits, certainly not generic animal paintings.
This painting was probably commissioned by the surgeon and naturalist John Hunter, and it depicts only the third-ever rhino to have been brought to Britain, a present from a governor of Lucknow. The animal was sold on and put on show to the public, but it died after developing a taste for sweet red wine, drinking 3 or 4 bottles at a time.
More importantly, Stubbs's close observation of the folds of skin and rough hide overturned the more familiar image to Europeans of the rhino from almost three centuries earlier, Albrecht Dürer's fantastic armour-plated beast, drawn not from the life, but from a written description and a brief sketch.
Round the corner from the dipso rhino, we find drawings from Stubb's last major project, an attempt to compare the anatomies of a human, a tiger and a fowl. Decades before Charles Darwin's findings on evolution, these works come across as remarkable in their bid to place man and animals on a similar level.
The show ends with one of Stubb's last paintings, painted in 1800, when he was 76. It's a melancholy subject: In front of a wood shrouded in darkness, Freeman, the gamekeeper of Stubb's patron, the Earl of Clarendon, holds a doe he has shot and wounded, and is about to slit its throat. The gamekeeper stares fixedly at us; death is approaching.
We thoroughly enjoyed this show. Informative, enthralling, comprehensive (we really only missed Stubbs's scenes of rural life, Reapers and Haymakers, but you can see those for free in Tate Britain anytime), it shows that Stubbs was much more than just the painter of horses he's often thought of as being. And with a wealth of pictures that are normally fairly inaccessible, it's well worth the trip out to Milton Keynes.
The gallery is at 900 Midsummer Boulevard in the town's theatre district. There are plenty of trains from London Euston to Milton Keynes Central, with fast services taking 30-40 minutes. Come out of the station entrance and walk straight ahead for just over 2 kilometres, and you'll come to the gallery. It's not the most scenic of walks, to be sure, but it's by no means uninteresting to see how urban planners 50 years ago thought the future should look. Buses from the station are also available!
A condensed version of the exhibition -- 13 paintings out of the more than 30 on show in Milton Keynes, but including the skeleton of Eclipse and of course Whistlejacket -- will be on display at the Mauritshuis in The Hague from February 20 to June 1.
George Stubbs, Eclipse at Newmarket, with a Groom and Jockey, c. 1794, The Jockey Club, Newmarket
George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, 1762. © National Gallery, London
George Stubbs, John and Sophia Musters Riding past the South Front of Colwick Hall, 1777, Private collection
George Stubbs, A Cheetah and a Stag with Two Indian Attendants, c. 1765. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images
George Stubbs, Rhinoceros, 1790-91, Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, London. © Royal College of Surgeons of England
George Stubbs, Drawings for a Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body, with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl, 1795-1806, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, Connecticut
George Stubbs, Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon's Gamekeeper, with a Dying Doe and Hound, 1800, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, Connecticut
We'll get back to Stubbs very shortly, but just in case you're thinking Milton Keynes is an odd place to go for a big art show, you'd be wrong, because the MK Gallery has recently been extended and boasts an impressively large exhibition space -- and an ambitious programme. This is the first big Stubbs overview in three decades, and the curators have assembled pictures from a wide range of lenders, the sort you tend not to pop into for a look at their paintings, like the Jockey Club and the Royal Veterinary College.
Oh, and there's Whistlejacket, too, Stubbs's most famous, most impressive achievement.
Here's Stubbs's painting of Eclipse after a race at Newmarket, in front of the rubbing-down house, where horses were cleaned after races.
From 1756 to 1758 Stubbs spent 18 months dissecting the bodies of up to a dozen horses on a farm in Lincolnshire and drawing the various stages of dissection in great detail for a book called The Anatomy of the Horse, which drew widespread praise when it was published in the following decade. Muscles, veins, arteries, nerves: All was minutely recorded. You can see the drawings on the walls around the skeleton of Eclipse, and they are truly astonishing.
Stubbs had in fact carried on such work from early in his career. At the start of this exhibition, glass cases contain some astounding illustrations he made in his mid-20s for a book on midwifery, including studies of the foetus in the womb. Stubbs created the plates for the book from his own drawings, having taught himself how to do so from scratch. A Leonardo-like mind at work here.
It was such painstaking working methods that enabled Stubbs to recreate horses on canvas more accurately than anyone before -- "all done from nature," as he said. These are individual portraits, certainly not generic animal paintings.
The probably apocryphal story is that when Whistlejacket, another temperamental horse, saw his lifesize recreation in paint by Stubbs for Lord Rockingham, his owner, he tried "to get at it, to fight and to kick it."
If you're used to seeing Whistlejacket amid the crowds of the National Gallery, it's a remarkable experience seeing it in this show in Milton Keynes. It was, admittedly, midweek when we were there, but we were for some time the only visitors in the room in front of one of the country's most striking works of art. Fantastic to have it all to yourself, but a slightly bizarre feeling....
Of course, Stubbs didn't just paint horses. In fact, we learn, he had more paintings of dogs exhibited at the Royal Academy than of horses. These wonderfully portrayed canines were like the horses the prized possessions of gentry. And of course, there are people, though they always seem to take second billing to the animals.
Among the pictures on show in Milton Keynes is Stubbs's earliest-known painting, of Sir Henry Nelthorpe and his wife Elizabeth, from around 1746, in its first public appearance. The Nelthorpes encouraged Stubbs in his anatomical research. We can't show this picture, because like a number of others on display here it can't be photographed, but you're aware of a slightly odd, awkward feel to Stubb's depiction of Elizabeth's face. The clothes, on the other hand, are precisely rendered, perhaps the result of the fact that the artist was the son of a leather-worker.
Three decades on, though, and in 1777 Stubbs could do polished elegance with ease. Eye-catching in red is society beauty Sophia Musters, newly married to John, High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, in front of their freshly redesigned residence, Colwick Hall. She's got the man, the house, the horses and the dogs....
There is, fascinatingly, a great sub-plot. Sophia had a number of affairs, and when she left her husband for another man, he had her painted out, to be replaced by an attendant leading her horse on foot. It was only in the 1930s that the changes were reversed during conservation work.
If Whistlejacket is Stubb's most famous painting, A Cheetah and a Stag with Two Indian Attendants may be the second best-known.
It was commissioned by Lord Pigot of Patshull, who'd brought the cheetah back to Britain on his return from a stint as Governor of Madras. It was shown in 1765, and may refer back to a display the previous year in which a big cat was released in Windsor Great Park to hunt a stag. The cat came off worse, tossed by the stag's antlers. "Go get him," the attendant in the centre seems to be urging the cheetah, which appears unpersuaded.
You name your animal, Stubbs could draw it or paint it. Lemurs, moose, or indeed a rhinoceros.
More importantly, Stubbs's close observation of the folds of skin and rough hide overturned the more familiar image to Europeans of the rhino from almost three centuries earlier, Albrecht Dürer's fantastic armour-plated beast, drawn not from the life, but from a written description and a brief sketch.
Round the corner from the dipso rhino, we find drawings from Stubb's last major project, an attempt to compare the anatomies of a human, a tiger and a fowl. Decades before Charles Darwin's findings on evolution, these works come across as remarkable in their bid to place man and animals on a similar level.
Practicalities
George Stubbs: 'All Done from Nature' will be on at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes until January 26. Opening hours are 1100 to 1900 Tuesday to Saturday, 1100 to 1700 on Sunday. You can tell you're outside London, because full-price tickets are an astonishingly cheap £9.35 including Gift Aid donation, £8.50 without.The gallery is at 900 Midsummer Boulevard in the town's theatre district. There are plenty of trains from London Euston to Milton Keynes Central, with fast services taking 30-40 minutes. Come out of the station entrance and walk straight ahead for just over 2 kilometres, and you'll come to the gallery. It's not the most scenic of walks, to be sure, but it's by no means uninteresting to see how urban planners 50 years ago thought the future should look. Buses from the station are also available!
A condensed version of the exhibition -- 13 paintings out of the more than 30 on show in Milton Keynes, but including the skeleton of Eclipse and of course Whistlejacket -- will be on display at the Mauritshuis in The Hague from February 20 to June 1.
Images
Skeleton of Eclipse, Royal Veterinary College, in front of George Stubbs's WhistlejacketGeorge Stubbs, Eclipse at Newmarket, with a Groom and Jockey, c. 1794, The Jockey Club, Newmarket
George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, 1762. © National Gallery, London
George Stubbs, John and Sophia Musters Riding past the South Front of Colwick Hall, 1777, Private collection
George Stubbs, A Cheetah and a Stag with Two Indian Attendants, c. 1765. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images
George Stubbs, Rhinoceros, 1790-91, Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, London. © Royal College of Surgeons of England
George Stubbs, Drawings for a Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body, with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl, 1795-1806, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, Connecticut
George Stubbs, Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon's Gamekeeper, with a Dying Doe and Hound, 1800, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, Connecticut
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