John McEwen

Life Itself Is Here

George Stubbs and the Wide Creation

By

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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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