Whistlejacket

I am just back from my London trip. Always good to go; and good to come home as well. As promised, I would be bringing some new 18th Century info from my travels.

I start this morning with an incredible painting I saw in the National Gallery, by George Stubbs, English painter, best known for his paintings of horses. He lived from 1724 to 1806, and was almost obsessive in his detail of the equine anatomy. He studied in York, and in 1756 he spent a year and a half in Lincolnshire studying, dissecting, and doing experiments on dead horses in order to better understand their anatomy. He even suspended the cadavers with block and tackle, so as to study them in different positions. Obsessed, right!?

Wandering through the gallery, I entered a room where an enormous horse seems to be leaping right off the wall and into the room. Rendered in such detail, including blemishes, veins, muscles flexed, he is virtually alive. The painting's background is left plain and in a beige/brown hue. Painted in 1762 for the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, of the famous race horse, Whistlejacket, his most famous win was for a race over four miles, for 2000 guineas. Rockingham paid 60 guineas for the portrait. Contemporary opinion was that it was unfinished, but Stubbs chose an interesting and unforgetable way to immortalize Whistlejacket. The horse, and horse alone!