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| Reapers, 1785, oil on panel, Tate, London, Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery, The Art Fund, the Pilgrim Trust, and subscribers 1977 |
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This exhibition commemorates the bicentenary of the death of George Stubbs, a master of British painting. Born in Liverpool, Stubbs was largely self-taught as an artist. A highly intelligent and enterprising man, he mastered fields as diverse as human and animal anatomy and the chemistry of pigments in order to excel in painting. Stubbs settled in London, where his groundbreaking treatise, The Anatomy of the Horse (1766), earned him fame and commercial success. His sporting pictures and portraits of racehorses secured him the enthusiastic patronage of the landed aristocracy. Contemporary critics, however, often dismissed Stubbs as a mere horse painter — a realist incapable of rendering grand themes. Their pejorative view prevailed for almost two hundred years. After his death Stubbs remained practically unknown until British scholars and the American collector Paul Mellon revived his reputation in the mid-twentieth century. At the Frick, seventeen masterpieces, drawn exclusively from British public and private collections, represent almost the full range of Stubbs’s subjects — from his famous depictions of thoroughbred racehorses and exotic animals to his iconic portrayals of English country life. Shown in the gallery at left are paintings depicting interrelationships between animals and humans. In the gallery at right are pictures solely devoted to animals. Stubbs diligently prepared for each of these works, executing numerous life drawings and landscape studies, now almost all lost. The paintings are highly distilled images, vividly naturalistic, yet also idealized. In them Stubbs expressed his remarkable ability to depict nature both as it is and how it perfectly might be. His acute powers of observation, gracefully choreographed compositions, and meticulous technique render each of these paintings timeless statements celebrating the relationship between nature and art.
Major funding for George Stubbs (1724–1806): A Celebration has been provided by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation. Corporate support has been provided by Fiduciary Trust Company International. Generous support has also been provided by Francis Finlay, Melvin R. Seiden in honor of Colin B. Bailey, and by the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities.
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