Everything keeps getting simpler and shallower – even exhibitions at the National Gallery. A decade ago, if it put on a show about George Stubbs, the 18th-century painter of the natural world, you’d get a thorough survey of the Liverpool-born artist who left a huge number of great portraits of animals – not just horses but a zebra, a kangaroo, a rhinoceros. But in 2026, the National gives him a single room aimed at the most incurious of audiences.
It is certainly a beautiful room. Towering at the centre is a spectacular painting of a riderless, unsaddled, rearing horse called Scrub. As you contemplate his chestnut flanks, something weird happens: a network of veins becomes visible and the ribcage materialises like an X-ray. Look to the left and you see where Stubbs got such an uncanny ability to see inside Scrub. Some of the stunning drawings he did as research for his 1766 book The Anatomy of the Horse hang like spectres against the dark green wall. Stubbs took these horses apart, hiding out in a cottage in Lincolnshire where he could sling up their carcasses and reverently eviscerate them. The flayed, dissected bodies possess a mysterious dignity.
