Stubbs: Horse Picture Review – This Gorgeous Growl Deserves a Longer Canter | art

eEverything becomes simpler and shallower, even the exhibitions in the National Gallery. A decade ago, if a show was given on George Stubbs, the 18th-century painter of the natural world, you would get a comprehensive survey of the Liverpool-born artist who left behind a large number of wonderful images of animals – not just horses but also zebras, kangaroos and rhinos. But in 2026, The National gives it a single room aimed at more curious audiences.

It’s definitely a beautiful room. Towering in the center is a stunning painting of a rearing horse, riderless and saddleless, named Scrub. As you peer into his chestnut wings, something strange happens: a network of veins becomes visible and his rib cage materializes like an X-ray. Look to the left and you’ll see where Stubbs gained this strange ability to see inside Scrub. Some of the startling drawings he made while researching his 1766 book Anatomy of a Horse hang like ghosts on the dark green wall. Stubbs dismounted these horses and hid himself in a cabin in Lincolnshire where he could impale their carcasses and reverently eviscerate them. Flayed and dissected corpses possess a mysterious dignity.

And that’s all, except for two later pictures, of smaller horses and an interloping sheep who hold their own in this company. It didn’t take nearly as long, even with repeated looks, and I’m a big fan of it. And one aspect of this is very strange – why do we need a display around Stubbs’s great horse portrait, when at the end of the dramatic architectural spectacle in the museum’s permanent collection displays, always admired by a crowd of visitors, you will find Whistlejacket, his greatest horse portrait ever?

One of the reasons Whistlejacket is so beloved by contemporary viewers is that Stubbs left him in an olive-colored void, his locks casting shadows in the void, making this painting of horses an icon of conceptual art. Scrub is also full of poetic nuance and shade but it’s not a perfect palette like Whistlejacket. He stands beside a lake in a romantic wooded landscape that is quite sketchy, and unnaturally placed within it. So what we have here is an image of a horse that is not as good as Whistlejacket.

However, there is a great historical connection between the horses themselves. These two famous thoroughbreds belonged to the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, gambler, horse lover, and Liberal (or at least Whig) politician, who commissioned Stubbs to paint both for the grand classical interior of his stately home in South Yorkshire, known today as Wentworth Woodhouse.

To tell this story is to excavate eighteenth-century Britain with all its many contradictions, its scientific Enlightenment, its discovery of romance and grass, and the shadows of the slave trade. But this show doesn’t dig. It shares a sublime, delicate, less entirely committed quality with the other current National Gallery offering of Stubbs’s contemporary, Derby’s Joseph Wright.

Stubbs and Wright belonged to the radical, forward-looking side of eighteenth-century Britain. Both were born far from London, had careers outside the institution of the Royal Academy, and were fascinated by the new science, by the outlook of the Enlightenment. Stubbs truly believed he was doing science when he dissected horses. He is an artist whose themes of power, control and freedom are filled with political overtones. The son of a tanner, he grew up surrounded by the smell of slaughtered animals – and the sight of human oppression in Liverpool, a slave port.

His paintings of animals pose questions about how we relate to other species – and other humans. For him, horses are servants or slaves, their souls far superior to those of their masters. They are the Houyhnhnms, the sensitive and wise horses in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satire Gulliver’s Travels, and their terrible Yahoo masters. In his pictures for Scrub and Whistlejacket he released them.

A scrub is not just a beautiful piece of horse meat. Glimpses of his anatomy isn’t just Stubbs showing off his knowledge. Rather, he does something similar to Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nikolai Tulp: through the bloody facts of anatomy he proposes the inner mystery of existence, the inner self…the soul?

You begin to see that the anatomical drawings are ghostly. The spirits of these horses spring from the page in a fantastical way that could be compared to William Blake – except that Stubbs is a much better artist than Blake.

George Stubbs is a true British great who deserves as many exhibitions as Constable and Turner, and much more than Blake – but he is still seen as a ‘sporting artist’ or seen as a tool of the aristocracy, his radical vision goes beyond our heads, and the best the National Gallery can provide for him is a single room. I loved everything about it. But he deserves much more than that, and we do too, because this artist can change the world if we all see through his eyes.