George Stubbs’s celebrated painting of a Spanish pointer dog is to be auctioned at Sotheby’s for the first time since 1972.
The 18th-century painting is being offered for auction at £1,500,000-2,000,000. It was last auctioned for £30,000 in 1972, and fetched £11 when it was auctioned in 1802.
The Liverpool-born artist, who died aged 81 in 1806, is known to have finished fewer than 400 paintings over the span of his career. Stubbs is best known for his paintings of animals, particularly horses.
The Spanish Pointer is believed to have been painted between 1766 and 1768 and is the earliest dog painting that Stubbs is known to have produced.
The 1760s has long been considered to be a prolific decade in Stubbs’s career, during which he produced many of the paintings for which he is best known; including Whistlejacket, which is displayed at the National Gallery.
Stubbs’s The Spanish Pointer has only ever had one official exhibition since it was painted, in London at the National Gallery of Sports and Pastimes in 1948. The last time the public would have had the opportunity to view it would have been in 1972 at Sotheby’s.
The 18th century saw a rise in the importance of dogs in British culture due to the growing popularity of field sports, in particular shooting, popular among the wealthy elites at the time.
Julian Gascoigne, a senior director and British paintings specialist at Sotheby’s, said: “It’s exciting for a number of reasons, firstly because it’s a painting that has been lost, if that’s not too dramatic a word, since the 1970s.”
Gascoigne said the painting’s condition was still “fantastic” unlike a lot of Stubbs’s works which, he says, “didn’t last the test of time”.
“By the sort of middle of his career he was mucking about with people like Josiah Wedgwood and experimenting with enamel and all sorts of things, and mixing wax into his pigments. Whereas this picture is from the first decade of his career, the mid-1760s, when he’s absolutely at the peak of his career.
“It’s the same period that he’s painting Whistlejacket, which is in the National Gallery, and many of his most famous and much-loved paintings, and his technical use of paint was much more solid at this period, and as a result it’s survived in beautiful condition, which is sadly not true of very many of his works.”
The painting will be free to view as part of an exhibition of old master and 19th-century paintings for auction at Sotheby’s in west London, 29 November-4 December.
