|
COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Don't know your gaskin from your fetlock? Never mind, go to the Frick anyway for a show that in just seventeen paintings manages to convey the fabulous weirdness of the eighteenth-century English artist George Stubbs.
Stubbs has been known since his own day as a horse painter, the greatest ever. He wore the honor like a hair shirt, aware that it was what had brought him success with the horsy British aristocracy, and yet wanting desperately to be taken seriously as a history painter. But you look at his efforts in that genre and find yourself saying, inevitably, "Aren't the horses good?" Excluded from the founding fellowship of the Royal Academy, Stubbs smarted at being treated as the master of a low genre, more like a jockey or a stud groom, which is perhaps why he paints such figures in attitudes of lordly grandeur.
Yet his art was always more than a day at the races. Stubbs, born in 1724, emerged from provincial obscurity in the seventeen-sixties, just when the British Empire was feeling its oats, on the eve of the American Inconvenience. Loaded with money from land and trade, the Whig aristocracy in the first decade of George III's reign was politically powerful and culturally ravenous. In truth, these nobles had been lording it only since the revolution of 1688, and, like all relatively new elites, had transferred their defensive grandeur into an...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
