Queen's Beasts
ART
13\ ROY STRONG THE new exhibition of animal paintings at the Queen's Gallery is definitely for all those of you who have a Sartorius in your bathroom. This is not so dotty as it sounds, for I recently climbed the backstairs of a house in Cornwall past twenty-five gorgeous horse meets dog pic- tures by Sartorius into a bathroom which had a life-size grey mare over the tub. It must, 1 suppose, be rather passé to have your horse pic- tures in the hall as at Badminton, Althorp or Longleat. At Buckingham Palace. for instance, you put them in your converted chapel. The re- sulting exhibition is fascinating in the potential breadth of its appeal. Art historians will conic to talk Stubbs, race-horse owners from Newbury will study form, zoologists will contemplate the first gnus to arrive in this country and children will be spellbound by much prettiness. As blood sports have been resolutely by-passed it is also absolutely safe to bring Aunt Maud.
English animal painting begins in the middle of the seventeenth century with Francis Barlow's pictures of stuffed birds catapulted through space, and skips on via Tillemans and the engaging crudities of Seymour and his followers to achieve its first master in John Wootton. None of these is represented in the exhibition, although the Royal Collection does in fact contain a ravishing series of pictures of Frederick, Prince of Wales, a la chasse by Wootton with portrait heads by Hogarth. It is ironic that the very monarchs most devoted to the chase and to horse racing—James I, Charles II, Queen Anne and George III—never commissioned artists to record the objects of their passion. So the show opens on a jolt with Butcher Cumberland and his patronage of Sawrey Gilpin. One is admittedly by-passing the most superb picture in the show, Van Dyck's tnodello of Charles I on horseback, but this belongs firmly to a tradition that stems back via Titian's Charles V to the equestrian statues of the emperors of antiquity. Cumberland's patronage of Sawrey Gilpin makes something of a limp start, charm- ing though his compositions are, but this is more than made up for by the pretty Sandby sheiches of the Duke's horses being exercised outside the barrack-like stables at Cumberland Lodge. These moreover prepare us for the major revela- tion of the exhibition, the great wall banked with paintings by George Stubbs.
It is difficult to find words adequately to de- scribe the moving classic beauty of Stubbs's horse pictures. Through his supreme gifts, he raises animal portraits from the level of useful back passage or breakfast room wall-covering, to sub- lime works of art. Eleven are gathered together in this exhibition, nearly all commissioned by George IV as Prince of Wales, whose own por- trait, crop in hand, flitting on horseback through the morning mist of Hyde Park, is surely the most romantic picture ever painted of him. Besides his horses, each trapped for all time in landscapes of bewitching beauty and relentless realism, there is the haughty absurdity of the Pomeranian dog, Fino. black and white fur brushed out, bristling like a dowager duchess in Beaton's Ascot scene. As John Lennon says of his wrestling dog: 'But who would fight this wondrous beast? I wouldn't for a kick off.' The same dog, suitably cut down to size, jumps up and tries to attract our attention again in the most wondrous of the pictures, that depicting Prinny's
gaily painted phaeton with attendant horses and grooms. Everyone knows a Stubbs horse when he sees one, but one ought equally to recognise a Stubbs servant. It is these that most move and impress by their nobility of bearing. John Gas- coigne, in buff coat and beaver hat, making his way across field with a sieve full of oats for Creeper, William Anderson, Helper and Hack
Groom, with two saddle-horses and the massive figure of Samuel Thomas, the Regent's Body Coachman. These are servants in the real sense of the word before the Victorian nouveaux riches confused service with servility.
These breathtaking pictures dramatise for us the dilemma that faced eighteenth-century Eng- lish painting, which was dominated by the con- cept of a hierarchy of genres, one in which the animal painter sat on a very lowly rung of the ladder. Reynolds and the academic theorists con- tinued to uphold the superiority of history paint- ing -Reynolds pathetically having to pull his own art up by the bootstraps, cramming it with re- condite allusion. When we think of the eighteenth century now it is not the dreary acres of canvas
perpetrated by Gawen Hamilton or Angelica Kauffmann, showing sonic obscure incident in Virgil or Ovid, but a Hogarth servant, a Gains-
borough landscape or a Stubbs horse. Stubbs's
masterpieces in this exhibition anticipate this final collapse of the hierarchy which led directly to our present position, of looking at each work of art, whether it depicts a duchess or a dead fly, on its own merits irrespective of subject-matter.
Although one can admire Sir Edwin Land- seer's brilliant, fluent brushwork, his animal pic- tures are pretty nauseating in their sentimentality.
The real horror is that these will undoubtedly be among the most popular items in the exhibition, epitomising as they do present lower-middle and working-class taste, visual standards formed for the most part by pictures on the lids of biscuit tins. The dogs idolised by Queen Victoria and her family, Islay, Dash, Cairnmach, Deckel, Eos, Flo, May, Dandie and the rest, mark that awful moment in time when the household animal be- cdme the pet. 'I hope you have had him buried in a nice spot and have got a little bit of his beautiful silky-white hair,' Victoria wrote to her mother on the demise of a Maltese dog, Lamb- kin. Nearby Landseer's group portrait of Islay and Tilco with a red macaw and love birds de- monstrates this transmutation of animals into comic little human beings. The case-load of Faberge animals, all carved from precious and semi-precious stones collected by Queen Alex- andra, are well on the way to plaster gnome land and the debased creations of Disney.
This is a jolly exhibition but understandably my favourite royal animal, James l's dog Jewel, is not there. 'At their last being at Theobalds,' wrote that irresistible gossip John Chamberlain, `the Queen shooting a deer mistook her mark, and killed Jewel the King's most special and favourite hound; at which he stormed exceed- ingly awhile; but after he knew who did it, he was
soon pacified, and with much kindness wished her not to be troubled with it, for he should love her never the worse.' As a peace-offering James gave his Queen Greenwich, and under her auspices arose the first English palladian villa, Inigo Jones's Queen's House. What a superb tombstone for a royal dog.
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