John McEwen
Life Itself Is Here
George Stubbs and the Wide Creation
By Robin Blake
Chatto & Windus 336pp £25 order from our bookshop
George Stubbs (1724–1806) is much more than a horse painter, as a discerning few knew in his lifetime, and as history has confirmed:
Thy pencil, Stubbs, no rival need to fear;
Not mimic art, but life itself is here
wrote his contemporary Horace Walpole; and Sacheverell Sitwell helped the modern revival by writing in 1936 that Stubbs had ‘the genius of creating’ and was ‘Nature herself’.
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