ART
Great George
BRYAN ROBERTSON
It is difficult to find words adequate for Stubbs, one of the three undisputed masters of the English school and comparable only to Turner in the depth, the sonority, of his genius: by comparison, Gainsborough
sounded it only fitfully, in The Morning Walk, for example. Stubbs is the one English painter who can, on many occa-
sions, stand comparison with Chardin, Goya and Velazquez. His few known draw- ings are incomparable inside the entire
range of European draughtsmanship of his time—and beyond it. There is now a chance to consider his equally dazzling, profoundly affecting, engraved work in a concise ex- hibition presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum under the auspices of the Mellon Foundation. This ;s the most urgent occasion in the London art world at the moment, and the most glorious. But it is my wretched duty to say, in the interests of Stubbs, that the usually infallible V and A has permitted the exhibition to be presented in a manner that would disgrace a provin- cial drawing society and not be tolerated as a demonstration of students' work, so far as lighting and space is concerned, in any minor art school. It is incredible that a study of one of our greatest national figures, containing rarely seen or unknown material, should be presented in this way. The Mellon Foundation would be well, within its rights to withdraw the exhibit.
As it is, the exhibition has been gathered together by Basil Taylor, the art historian and supreme Stubbs scholar; and like everything done by Mr Taylor on behalf of his hero, the act is one wholly informed by love as well as scholarship. Basil Tay- lor's catalogue, which accompanies the ex- hibition, is an essential document for any- one who wants to know the background circumstances of the engraved work and the handful of drawings known to be by Stubbs, several of which have been rescued from oblivion in recent years. Mr Taylor organised the Stubbs exhibition in 1957 at Whitechapel and compiled a uniquely in- formative catalogue. The present exhibition supplements our knowledge of the artist: it is a modest affair, in scale, but immense in implication.
Largely through unavoidable ignorance— for most of Stubbs's paintings are buried away in private collections in the country and rarely seen (many of the paintings shown at Whitechapel in 1957 had not been disclosed publicly since his death in 1806) - there is little general awareness, still, of the magnitude and range of Stubbs's geniusi' He is commonly thought of, with a slight lowering of the spirits for many people, as a horse painter to be compared with num- bers of more or less anonymous artists concerned with sporting scenes. In sup- posedly better informed circles, Stubbs is alternatively considered as a kind of English Douanier Rousseau whose sharply contoured phaetons. and horses standing motionless in becalmed parks, possess a primitive charm. Both views are absurd, as a glance at the engravings at the V and A will instantly prove.
Here we may now see the Midwifery' engravings, • the prints made for the Anatomy of the Horse, the Contnorwive Anatomical Exposition of the llitny, riody
with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl
drawings and engravings. In addition, there is a group of engravings of a foxhound— questing, sniffing the ground, poised at the alert with head suddenly turned and one paw raised—of a melting beauty, a graphic probity and intelligence, quite without parallel in English art. These studies are riveting. There are also the two engravings for the great pair of paintings executed in 1783, 1784 and 1785 in different versions (and, in one case, in enamel colours on a Wedgwood tablet, in 1794) of The Reapers and The Hay-makers: two of the most idyllic and artfully composed scenes in the evolution of European painting devoted to landscapes with figures. There is A Lion Resting on a Rock which is an incomparable work of the romantic imagination, quite apart from the veracity of its detail—the lion rears up, recumbent, above a high rocky ledge overlooking a lake by which palms grow, and appears to be an exten- sion in grandeur of scale and contour of the knoll which he surmounts, a final grand eruption of the mountain.
There is much else, and in everything the lofty imagination, the nobility and marvellous compression of Stubbs which gave to all his painting and each of his drawings and engravings the authority of freshly discovered truth. The imaginative pitch is terrific; the total command over hand and wrist, the perception of the eye, are awe-inspiring, comparable in my view only with Leonardo. There is nothing in Western art that could possibly surpass the spiritual grace and technical ease so readily discernible in the works at the V and A.
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