Andrew Graham-Dixon TV - Helen Rosslyn TV - Tim Marlow TV - This Green and Pleasant Land TV - The National Gallery online - James Fox TV -
The very greatest British artist of the 18th century: his name was George Stubbs. Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art III: My Wife, My Horse & Myself, BBC 1996
He had also studied anatomy from an early age … his drawings were already being circulated and admired ... Stubbs’ drawings had lifelike accuracy that no other artist had achieved. And in 1759 Richmond gave Stubbs his first major commission. To produce a series of equestrian portraits for Goodwood House ... Stubbs raised the status of sporting painting to become a form of country group portrait. This celebration of rural life heralded a new direction in art … Landscape in its own right. Helen Rosslyn, Bought with Love: The Secret History of British Art Collections II: The Golden Age, BBC 2013
George Stubbs is the greatest painter of horses who ever lived. He was a sporting artist but so much more than that. Great Artists With Tim Marlow s1e18: Stubbs, Sky Arts 2003
George Stubbs was born in Liverpool in 1724. ibid.
Stubbs took a popular but low-regarded form of painting and gave it gravitas and authority. ibid.
Stubbs was not a man to do things by halves. In order to paint horses better than anyone else ever had he rented a remote farmhouse in Lincolnshire and with the aid of Mrs Stubbs spent eighteen months cutting them up to see what they were made of. He brought a similar dedication to the landscapes in which they stood. This Green And Pleasant Land: The Story of British Landscape Painting, BBC 2011
Towards the end of his career Stubbs painted a series of rural landscapes with agricultural workers going about their business. ibid.
Stubbs’ rural labourers appear to be contented, clean and well dressed. Just as the British ruling classes liked to imagine them. ibid.
Stubbs was born in Liverpool, the son of a leather worker, and he spent his early career in the north, painting portraits and developing his interest in anatomy. In the later 1740s he lived in York and supplied the illustrations for a treatise on midwifery. Following a brief visit to Rome in 1754 he settled in Lincolnshire, where he researched his major publication The Anatomy of the Horse. In about 1758 he moved to London which remained his base.
Early clients for his sporting and racing paintings included many of the noblemen who founded the Jockey Club. The National Gallery online biography
In the 18th century many Europeans began to reshape the natural world around them. James Fox, Nature & Us: A History Through Art II: Understanding Nature, BBC 2021
Perhaps best expressed in the art of George Stubbs. ibid.