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.
And that’s about it, bar a couple of later, smaller horse portraits and an interloping sheep that holds its own in this company. It didn’t take me nearly long enough, even with repeated lingering looks, and I’m a passionate fan. And one aspect of this is very odd – why do we need a display about a grand Stubbs horse portrait when, at the end of a dramatic architectural sightline in the museum’s permanent collection displays, always admired by a crowd of visitors, you’ll find Whistlejacket, his greatest horse portrait of all?
One of the reasons Whistlejacket enthrals modern onlookers is that Stubbs left him in olive-toned emptiness, his fetlocks casting shadows in the void, making this equine painting an icon of conceptual art. Scrub, too, is full of nuance and poetic shadow but not as perfect a painting as Whistlejacket. He stands by a lake in a romantic wooded landscape that is quite cursory, and is placed unnaturally within it. So what we have here is a horse portrait that’s not quite as good as Whistlejacket.
Yet there’s a major historical link between the horses themselves. Both these famous thoroughbreds belonged to the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, gambler, horse aficionado, liberal (or at least Whig) politician, who commissioned Stubbs to paint both for the grand classical interior of his south Yorkshire stately home, known today as Wentworth Woodhouse.
To tell that story means digging into 18th-century Britain with all its many contradictions, its scientific Enlightenment, its discovery of Romanticism and the turf, the shadow of its slave trade. But this exhibition doesn’t dig. It shares a tiptoeing, delicate, less than totally committed quality with the National Gallery’s other current show of Stubbs’s contemporary, Joseph Wright of Derby.
Stubbs and Wright belonged to the radical, forward-looking side of 18th-century Britain. Both were born far from London, had careers outside the Royal Academy establishment and were entranced by the new science, the gaze of the Enlightenment. Stubbs rightly believed he was doing science when he dissected horses. He is an artist whose themes of power, control and freedom are full of political suggestiveness. The son of a tanner, he grew up surrounded with the stench of slaughtered animals – and the sight of human oppression in Liverpool, a slaving port.
His paintings of animals ask questions about how we treat other species – and other humans. Horses, for him, are servants or slaves whose souls are much finer than those of their masters. They are the Houyhnhnms, the sensitive, wise horses in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satire Gulliver’s Travels, and their masters the horrible Yahoos. In his portraits of Scrub and Whistlejacket he sets them free.
Scrub isn’t just a fine piece of horseflesh. The glimpses of his anatomy are not just Stubbs showing off his science. Rather, he does something comparable with Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp: through the bloody facts of anatomy he suggests the inner mystery of being, the interior self … the soul?
You begin to see that the anatomical drawings are ghostly. The spirits of these horses emanate from the page in a visionary way I’d compare with William Blake – except that Stubbs is a much better artist than Blake.
George Stubbs is a true British great who deserves as many exhibitions as Constable and Turner, and many more than Blake – but he still gets dismissed as a “sporting artist” or seen as a stooge of the aristocracy, his radical vision going above our heads, and the best the National Gallery can afford him is one room. I loved everything in it. But he deserves so much more and we do too, for this artist could change the world if we all saw with his eyes.
