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拍品專文
This imposing canvas showing a horse with two dogs in a landscape is a fine example of Stubbs' work from the early 1790s, a period of intense artistic activity in which he received a succession of important commissions from the Prince of Wales, later King George IV. These royal works - all executed on the same scale as the present canvas - witnessed some of the artist's most sophisticated compositions and did much for cementing his reputation as the leading animal painter of the age. Inaccessible to recent scholars of the artist’s work, the present picture has not appeared on the open market since the celebrated Hutchinson sale of sporting art at Christie’s in 1951.
Stubbs' highly engaging, almost rococo-like composition balances dynamism with the quiet atmosphere of rural peace and coexistence that marks his finest animal ‘conversation pieces’. The prancing horse and two dogs, executed with characteristic precision, are in deliberate contrast to the vaporous landscape, in which a stretch of water and distant hills lie beneath a great expanse of sky, the horizon line of which is punctuated only by the protagonist and an extravagant group of burdock leaves.
The dog on the right of the composition, known in the eighteenth-century as a Pomeranian fox, is a breed that Stubbs had evidently studied carefully, no doubt largely prompted by the commissions he received from the Prince of Wales at the start of this decade. The Prince Regent, who was painted by Stubbs in the same year as the present canvas – riding along the bank of the Serpentine River in Hyde Park (London, Royal Collection; Egerton, op. cit., p. 536, no. 300) – inherited a passion for the spitz breed from his mother, Queen Charlotte. The future King ordered a picture of his favourite dog, Fino, a magnificent and immaculately groomed black and white Pomeranian, who completely upstages the accompanying King Charles Spaniel – appositely named Tiny – in the eponymous double portrait in the Royal Collection (Egerton, op. cit., p. 530, no. 295). In her entry for the double portrait, exhibited by Stubbs at the Royal Academy in 1791, Judy Egerton notes that the bleak mountainous backdrop, not unlike that in the present work, possibly alludes to the northern origins of the Spitz breed (ibid.). Fino would later reappear leaping up on his hind legs towards a startled coach horse in Stubbs' 1793 canvas The Prince of Wales' Phaeton (London, Royal Collection; Egerton, op. cit., p. 544, no. 306). It is surely no coincidence that Mary Robinson (1758-1800), the celebrated actress and writer, is shown with a Pomeranian in Gainsborough’s sumptuous full-length (London, Wallace Collection; fig. 1), commissioned in 1781 by the Prince of Wales, with whom the sitter had a notoriously public affair. The breed’s popularity during this period is further attested to by Gainsborough’s earlier canvas depicting a Pomeranian Bitch and Puppy, painted in circa 1777 (London, Tate Britain).
Basil Taylor described this moment for Stubbs as ‘an Indian summer…comparable with the early years in London, when there must have always been a commissioned work in progress on his easel’ (Stubbs, London, 1971, p. 22). Taylor drew a further parallel with this formative period in the context of the artist’s ‘tone, colour and drawing’ at the start of the 1790s which, as with his output from the 1760s, betrays the influence of his practice in enamel, a technique that became something of an obsession for Stubbs and, in turn, the source of an irreconcilable feud with the Royal Academy (ibid.). Indeed, it was in 1791 that Stubbs painted two oval portraits in that medium, executed on Wedgwood ceramic tablet, of the much maligned former Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings (1732-1818; Egerton, nos. 281 & 282), both of which were preceded that year by a version in oil (no. 280).
Judy Egerton was unable to inspect the present picture in preparation for her 2007 catalogue and, as a result, listed it in a section entitled 'Paintings by Stubbs reliably recorded but now untraced' (op. cit.). However, the picture had been included and reproduced in Animal Painting in England - From Barlow to Landseer, published in 1955 by Basil Taylor, the art historian who did more than any individual to revive Stubbs' reputation, culminating in his seminal 1971 catalogue of the artist's work. In 1959, Taylor met Paul Mellon, with whom he shared a deep passion for Stubbs and whose first acquisition, in 1936, had been the artist's Pumpkin with a Stable-Lad (1774; Egerton, no. 159), a work Mellon later described as 'still my favourite British Painting' (Reflections in a Silver Spoon, 1992, p. 280). Taylor would become Mellon's principal advisor in the formation of the latter's collection of British pictures, which includes the constellation of masterpieces by Stubbs now at the Yale Center for British Art (fig. 2).
The picture was bought by Walter Hutchinson, who founded the National Gallery of British Sports and Pastimes a year before his death in 1950. A publisher and printer, Hutchinson formed a remarkable collection of British and sporting pictures that were dispersed in a sale at Christie's in 1951. This included no fewer than twelve works by Stubbs, including the artist’s outstanding masterpiece Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath (c. 1765; Private collection), which fetched the exceptional sum of 12,000 guineas and subsequently sold in these Rooms, 5 July 2011, lot 12, for £22,441,250. In addition to an impressive number of works by Munnings, Hutchinson's sale also included portraits by both William Hogarth and Johann Zoffany, as well as Constable’s celebrated Stratford Mill (1820), now in the National Gallery, London.
Stubbs' highly engaging, almost rococo-like composition balances dynamism with the quiet atmosphere of rural peace and coexistence that marks his finest animal ‘conversation pieces’. The prancing horse and two dogs, executed with characteristic precision, are in deliberate contrast to the vaporous landscape, in which a stretch of water and distant hills lie beneath a great expanse of sky, the horizon line of which is punctuated only by the protagonist and an extravagant group of burdock leaves.
The dog on the right of the composition, known in the eighteenth-century as a Pomeranian fox, is a breed that Stubbs had evidently studied carefully, no doubt largely prompted by the commissions he received from the Prince of Wales at the start of this decade. The Prince Regent, who was painted by Stubbs in the same year as the present canvas – riding along the bank of the Serpentine River in Hyde Park (London, Royal Collection; Egerton, op. cit., p. 536, no. 300) – inherited a passion for the spitz breed from his mother, Queen Charlotte. The future King ordered a picture of his favourite dog, Fino, a magnificent and immaculately groomed black and white Pomeranian, who completely upstages the accompanying King Charles Spaniel – appositely named Tiny – in the eponymous double portrait in the Royal Collection (Egerton, op. cit., p. 530, no. 295). In her entry for the double portrait, exhibited by Stubbs at the Royal Academy in 1791, Judy Egerton notes that the bleak mountainous backdrop, not unlike that in the present work, possibly alludes to the northern origins of the Spitz breed (ibid.). Fino would later reappear leaping up on his hind legs towards a startled coach horse in Stubbs' 1793 canvas The Prince of Wales' Phaeton (London, Royal Collection; Egerton, op. cit., p. 544, no. 306). It is surely no coincidence that Mary Robinson (1758-1800), the celebrated actress and writer, is shown with a Pomeranian in Gainsborough’s sumptuous full-length (London, Wallace Collection; fig. 1), commissioned in 1781 by the Prince of Wales, with whom the sitter had a notoriously public affair. The breed’s popularity during this period is further attested to by Gainsborough’s earlier canvas depicting a Pomeranian Bitch and Puppy, painted in circa 1777 (London, Tate Britain).
Basil Taylor described this moment for Stubbs as ‘an Indian summer…comparable with the early years in London, when there must have always been a commissioned work in progress on his easel’ (Stubbs, London, 1971, p. 22). Taylor drew a further parallel with this formative period in the context of the artist’s ‘tone, colour and drawing’ at the start of the 1790s which, as with his output from the 1760s, betrays the influence of his practice in enamel, a technique that became something of an obsession for Stubbs and, in turn, the source of an irreconcilable feud with the Royal Academy (ibid.). Indeed, it was in 1791 that Stubbs painted two oval portraits in that medium, executed on Wedgwood ceramic tablet, of the much maligned former Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings (1732-1818; Egerton, nos. 281 & 282), both of which were preceded that year by a version in oil (no. 280).
Judy Egerton was unable to inspect the present picture in preparation for her 2007 catalogue and, as a result, listed it in a section entitled 'Paintings by Stubbs reliably recorded but now untraced' (op. cit.). However, the picture had been included and reproduced in Animal Painting in England - From Barlow to Landseer, published in 1955 by Basil Taylor, the art historian who did more than any individual to revive Stubbs' reputation, culminating in his seminal 1971 catalogue of the artist's work. In 1959, Taylor met Paul Mellon, with whom he shared a deep passion for Stubbs and whose first acquisition, in 1936, had been the artist's Pumpkin with a Stable-Lad (1774; Egerton, no. 159), a work Mellon later described as 'still my favourite British Painting' (Reflections in a Silver Spoon, 1992, p. 280). Taylor would become Mellon's principal advisor in the formation of the latter's collection of British pictures, which includes the constellation of masterpieces by Stubbs now at the Yale Center for British Art (fig. 2).
The picture was bought by Walter Hutchinson, who founded the National Gallery of British Sports and Pastimes a year before his death in 1950. A publisher and printer, Hutchinson formed a remarkable collection of British and sporting pictures that were dispersed in a sale at Christie's in 1951. This included no fewer than twelve works by Stubbs, including the artist’s outstanding masterpiece Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath (c. 1765; Private collection), which fetched the exceptional sum of 12,000 guineas and subsequently sold in these Rooms, 5 July 2011, lot 12, for £22,441,250. In addition to an impressive number of works by Munnings, Hutchinson's sale also included portraits by both William Hogarth and Johann Zoffany, as well as Constable’s celebrated Stratford Mill (1820), now in the National Gallery, London.