GEORGE STUBBS (1724-1806) was one of the most original artists Britain has produced. Such is the present reputation of his paintings, with their astonishingly convincing portraits of both animals and people, that it is easy to forget how much his success was based on rigorous scientiïŹc observation. In 1756 he rented an out-of-the-way farmhouse in northern Lincolnshire where he erected a special scaffold to hold the cadavers of horses as he dissected and drew. (It is said that he had a particularly strong stomach when it came to smells.) After eighteen months of single-minded dedication Stubbs produced the drawings for The Anatomy of the Horse, which he later etched himself. The result was a sensation. Letters of congratulation came from scientists from all over Europe, amazed not only at the perfection of the ïŹnished work, but that it had been produced privately, without any patronage. The Anatomy remained a textbook for artists and scientists for well over a century, and to this day the strange, spare beauty of these prints continues to fascinate.
This edition reproduces all Stubbsâ etchings and is taken from the 1853 printing, the last to use Stubbsâ original plates. The full text of Stubbsâ commentary is included for the veterinarially minded. Essays by Constance-Anne Parker and Oliver Kase place Stubbsâ work in the context of his life and times, and of 18th-century medical and veterinary science.
Constance-Anne Parker (1921â2016), a distinguished sculptor and painter, was the Librarian and Archivist of the Royal Academy, where she also lectured. She was the author of Mr. Stubbs the Horse Painter (1971), and George Stubbs: Art, Animals & Anatomy (1984)
Oliver Kase is Director of Collections at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, and oversees the Max Beckmann Archive. In 2011â12 he was assistant curator for The Art of Enlightenment, a major international exhibition organised between Germany and China. He lectures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversitĂ€t, Munich, and is the author of numerous publications on the art of the 18th to 21st centuries
THE ANATOMY OF THE HORSE
James Bretherton after Thomas Orde, 1st Baron Bolton, George Stubbs: A Sketch, undated, c. 1773-75
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It seems as though Stubbs always had to have a project on hand Some subject that was quite outside, though related to, the work that he was doing as a successful painter A project to work at, to inquire into and to experiment with. He seemed compelled to have a scientific investig ation as an occupation for the restless energ y of his mind As a child he was absorbed by the myster y of unknown natural for ms, and as a youth he explored the world of living structure
By 1745, at the age of 21 and living in York, where he was ear ning a living as a portrait painter, Stubbs was already giving lectures on anatomy to pupils at the local infir mar y. One of his contacts prevailed on him to illustrate a new book on mid wifer y in 1751, and for this it seems Stubbs taught himself the rudiments of etching and eng raving He was not satisfied by following the methods taught him, but immediately experimented to improve all the technical processes A brief visit to Rome only encouraged him to tur n to nature, rather than to art, for his inspiration; and some time in 1756 or 1757 he started to make his pre parations for a really tremendous project, that of producing a book on the anatomy of the hor se
T his was to take him the better part of ten year s to finish, and was the result of many more year s of study and observation It was â upon the advice of his young Chirugical friends with whom he had been previously connected at Yorkâ that he decided to âcomplete and publish T he Anatom y of the Horseâ . T his last quotation from Humphr y gives the impression that the project had been in Stubbsâ mind for a number of year s, and that he had done a good deal of preliminar y work on the subject with the book in mind In the preface to the book, he says that he consulted most of the treatises upon the subject, and when the book was advertised it said that it was the result of many year s of actual dissection Of the treatises upon the hor se, the most important, anatomically speaking, was Carlo Ruiniâs Dellâ Anatomia et dellâ Infir mita del Cavallo T his was published as early as 1598 and little that was published subsequently improved upon it, either illustratively or
anatomist, wrote of the illustrations: âT hey convey a general idea of the anatomy of the parts; but they cannot serve the painter What then is to be expected from the works of Sannier and Snape, and other s which are merely bad copies from the imperfect eng ravings of Ruini!â T here was not much inspiration to be g ained from these later works Stubbsâs own creative observation produced a completely fresh approach to the subject T he hor se appear s to be a living animal instead of a dead and stylized figure
To complete the final studies for this immense work Stubbs needed a period of peace and quiet, far away in the de pth of the countr y, where he could dissect without of fending anyone He went to Lincolnshire, to the small village of Horkstow, about six miles from Barton, where he had stayed when he was working for the Nelthor pes T here he â eng aged a far mhouse that he might without inconvenience to other s have dead hor ses, and subjects adapted to his pur pose â T he exact location of this far mhouse is not certain, but presumably it would have been some distance from the village and isolated from neighbour s. T he âinconvenienceâ would have been considerable had other far ms been within receiving distance of the nauseating a n d p e n e t r
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Landseer said of the lion which the Zoo had provided for him to use as a model for his bronze lions in Trafalg ar Square, and which had died whilst he was out of town: âAnything as fearful as the g ases from the royal remains it is dif ficult to conceive We shut our eyes to nasty inconvenience and open them to the importance of the opportunity of handling the dangerous subject whilst in a state of safety â
Stubbs must often have âshut his eyes to nasty inconvenienceâ during the next year and a half He tackled the whole project by himself, with no outside help, and with no other companion or assistant than Mar y Spencer, his common-law wife. It must have been rather hard on her, for unlike him she had not been brought up in the house of a tanner, and her nose was probably less accustomed to unpleasant odour s
T he medical students and surgeons from York failed to come to Stubbsâs assistance with either money or practical help, as they had originally promised So, sing le-handed, he beg an what to most men would be a life-work, and one requiring a good deal of careful org anization T here were three main operations to be conducted. Fir st, after the awkward and heavy job of rig ging up the dead hor se in the dissecting-roomstudio, there was the dirty work of stripping and cleaning, and the injection of the animalâs veins, pre parator y to beginning the dissection proper Second, having dissected and laid bare the part to be illustrated, there was the completely dif ferent task of making working drawings, which was clean, precise work, far away from the butcherâs shop atmosphere of bleeding the hor se to death, and then skinning and disembowelling it Finally, there was the writing up of the descriptions for the bookâs text
Humphr y gives this detailed account of the way Stubbs attacked the project:
As these studies and operations were singular and ver y important, the manner in which they were conducted may not be uninteresting to relate T he fir st subject which was pre pared was a hor se which was bled to death by the jugular vein, after which the arteries and veins were injected T hen a bar of iron was suspended from the ceiling of the room, by a Teag le of Iron to which Iron Hooks were fixed Under this bar a plank was swung about eighteen inches wide, for the Hor se â s feet to rest upon, and the Hor se was suspended to the Bar of Iron by the above mentioned Hooks which were fastened into the opposite side of the Hor se to that which was intended to be designed; by passing the Hooks through the ribs and fastening them under the Backbone and by these means the Hor se was fixed in the attitude which these prints re present and continued hanging in this posture six or seven weeks, or as long as they were fit for use
His drawings of a skeleton were previously made and then the operations upon this fixâd subject were thus begun. He fir st beg an by dissecting and designing the muscles of the abdomen proceeding through five dif ferent layer s of muscles till he came to the peritoneum and the pleura t h ro u g h w h i c h a p p e a r e d t h e l u n g s a n d t h e Intestines after which the Bowels were taken out and Cast away T hen he proceeded to dissect the Head, by fir st stripping of f the Skin and after having cleaned and pre pared the muscles &c for the drawing, he made careful designs of
them and with the explanation which usually employed him a whole day T hen he took of f another layer of Muscles, which he pre pared, designed and described, in the same manner as in the Book and so he proceeded till he came to the Skeleton It must be noted that by means of the Injections the muscles, the Blood-vessels and the Nerves retained their for m to the last without undergoing any change of position In this manner he advanced his work by stripping of f the skin and cleaning and pre paring as much of the subject as he concluded would employ a whole day to prepare design and describe, as above related till the whole subject was completed.
T he drawings for T h e A n a t o m y o f t h e H o rs e , or at any rate, some of the drawings made at Horkstow, can be seen and studied in the Royal Academy Librar y If looked at ver y closely, it is possible to see beneath the drawing of the muscles a faint trace of the skeleton, drawn in pale ink Also the outline or silhouette of the hor se was generally laid in, in the same manner Stubbs pre pared a master drawing of the silhouette of the hor se in the required pose, and the skeleton in the same position. T hese would have been traced on to a number of sheets of paper, the master drawing having been pricked all along the outline with tiny holes and placed over a blank sheet of paper, after which powdered charcoal or chalk would have been tapped, or pounced, through the holes on to the blank sheet, leaving a series of faintly dusted-in dots T hese little dots were then carefully joined up to refor m the exact outline of the master drawing It is fairly easy to see these joined dots on one or two of the drawings, as it gives a slightly jerky look to the line He also squared up some of the drawings and re produced them by this method T hese tracings were executed in pale ink leaving a permanent, but unobtrusive drawing, as a basis on which to place the muscular layer s as the dissections prog ressed dee per and dee per â thus giving a continuity of size and pose over a number of dif ferent hor ses; Stubbs said that he âdissected a g reat number of hor ses â .
One must bear in mind that many of these drawings were working studies through which Stubbs was g aining the knowledge and infor mation needed to produce the final set of finished drawings from which the plates were to be eng raved. Quite a number of these drawings are almost notes, rather than finished studies; they are rapidly and roughly scribbled in, in black chalk, and bear little visual resemblance to the plates It is interesting to note that while the side-view studies
M A K E T H E K N I F E G O
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Children in the eighteenth century played with wooden dolls or hobbyhorses; George Stubbs played with bones Ozias Humphry recalled in his Memoir that Stubbs, as a child in Liver pool of barely eight years old, was given bones and preserved specimens by a neighbouring doctor so that he could undertake his own small-scale anatomical research On his deathbed, Stubbs, by then eighty-one, reg retted not being able to complete his work T he Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fo wl 2 As a theme, the study of anatomy repeated itself with such consistency and frequency in Stubbsâs artistic life that we might still ask today âwhether most to admire the artist as a dissector, or as a painter of animalsâ as the Gentlemanâs Ma gazine in 1806 did.3 The quandary is no different when we are faced with his most famous anatomical project: T he Anatomy of the Horse. The idea of publishing an atlas of equine anatomy probably took seed in the circle of Stubbsâs surgical colleagues at the Yo rk C o u n t y H o s p i t a l , wh e re h e w a s p e r fo r m i n g anatomical dissections and giving lectures by the time he was twenty 4 It was not, however, until 1756 that Stubbs took up the project in ear nest, having retur ned from a short sojour n in Italy. Humphry relates that Stubbs, largely alone but also with the occasional assistance of his common-law wife Mary Spencer, spent eighteen months dissecting, drawing and describing h o r s e s i n a f a r m h o u s e o r b a r n i n H o rk s t ow i n Lincolnshire 5 The eighteen highly polished drawings made by him there on the basis of twenty-four (still surviving) working sketches after dissecting approximately a dozen horses are timeless master pieces of animal anatomy. They show the horse as a skeleton first, in lateral, anterior, and posterior views and, then, the horseâs musculature from the same three perspectives. Stubbs lays the horse bare in no fewer than five steps Beginning with the subcutaneous tissue, Stubbs drills down into the deepest muscle layers, illustrating the position and paths of the ligaments on the skeleton as well as the deep blood vessels and nerves. These drawings still impress today in ter ms of their artistic just as much as their scientific achievement. Their exceptional elegance, clarity, and g raphic precision contrast hugely with the reality of the bloody, dirty and physically draining work that
Stubbs must have carried out amid the stink of rotting cadavers and in constant fear of infection In his search for qualified eng ravers who would be able to transpose the project into print, Stubbs brought the drawings to London in 1758, where they quickly became known on account of their outstanding quality.6 The story goes that even the most established eng ravers and printers, for example Arthur Pond and Charles Grignion, tur ned down the task of rendering the accomplished drawings for the press 7 Stubbs subsequently spent six years etching the printing plates himself, working in the early mor nings and at night, until they finally appeared in 1766 as an anatomical atlas supplemented by comprehensive descriptive texts from his own hand So accomplished were the etchings that we can speak of his ingenious translation of the drawings into prints The anatomist Peter Camper recognized the achievement in a letter to Stubbs in 1772 thus: âIâm amazed to meet in the same person so g reat an Anatomist, so accurate a Painter & so excellent an Eng raver â8 The path taken by Stubbsâs career is unusual in that before making the drawings for his Anatomy of the Horse he was neither an established nor experienced painter of horses but rather had been trying his hand as a portrait painter.9 His earliest known sketches for paintings of horses date to about 1759. Stubbsâs anatomical studies thus not only enriched and improved his work as a painter and portrayer of horses, but actually gave it its impulse The fact that Stubbs received a whole series of commissions for prestigious equine portraits and hunting scenes from 1760â61 onwards and was rapidly elevated to the leading painter of horses to the English nobility can only be explained by the early success of his anatomical drawings Two aspects are worthy of note here: in ter ms of his artistic practice Stubbsâs approach testifies to an uncompromising âcriticalâ (in the Enlightenment sense of the ter m) approach, in which painting is conceived of as a science and its subjects are examined through their reduction to their fundamental principles Yet the reasons for which Stubbsâs studies were successful still require explanation, for it was thanks to these studies that Stubbs was able to establish himself primarily as a horse painter, rather than as an anatomical draughtsman The question of how anatomical knowledge was
translated into painting, a process which in itself is hardly self-evident, apparently did not pose itself for his p at ro n s To h i s c o n t e m p o r a r i e s, S t u bb s â s ĂŠ s t h e t i c anatomical drawings must have appeared as the promising beginnings of a new, scientifically founded, horse painting At the same time, the situation was favourable for Stubbs: the leading painters of the older generation in this field, such as James Seymour (1702-1752), were already dead, or, like John Wootton (c 1682-1764), well advanced in years Stubbsâs drawings, moreover, were well-matched with an interest recently pursued by his potential clients: their systematic attempts in the area of horse-breeding chimed perfectly with Stubbsâs analytical investigation of the body of the horse.
ANATOMY AND IT S MEANING IN NATURAL HIS TORY AND VETERINARY MEDECINE
Veterinary College in London in 1791 Both the establishment of veterinary schools and Stubbsâs Anatomy of the Horse aspired to a science of animal anatomy In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, medical expertise in ter ms of horses took the for m of knowledge gained on the job by farriers, equerries, and horse doctors, knowledge which had been handed down by word of mouth or written down in compendiums of earlier publications Bourgelat sought to replace these traditions by critically overhauling texts and examining animals empirically, whilst being guided by unshakeable principles and exacting methods 14 For Bourgelat, anatomy was the most important element in the refounding animal medicine,15 an element which he had to promote energetically nonetheless Complexity and disgust were t h e t wo f u n d a m e n t a l p ro bl e m s o f a n at o my t h at Bourgelat faced Difficulties experienced by beginners in clearly differentiating between and recognising the individual anatomical parts were compounded by the fact that dissection was a dissuasively dirty business 16
âTHE ANATOMY OF THE HORSEâ IN THE CONTEXT OF âPOLITE SCIENCEâ AND THE FUNCTIONS OF ANATOMICAL ILLUS TRATION
In the age of Enlightenment, in which the sciences were under increasing pressure to legitimize themselves publically and to address interested laymen, disgust in the face of dead and f layed animals was a challenge which is not to be underestimated In its complexity and uncensored physicality, anatomy was only partially compatible with the criteria of so-called âpolite scienceâ, which was defined by intelligibility, usefulness, sociability, conversation and elegance of verbal presentation 17 Anatomical demonstrations were certainly now and XIII
