George Stubbs’ raw power
Art’s lion king

NEW HAVEN - No lion has ever attacked a horse, outside, perhaps, of the coliseums of Ancient Rome. It must have been a barbarous scene, two giant beasts wrenching and writhing to the death in a moment of chaotic butchery. The hand which could paint such a scene in the 18th century could not have been aiming to please by any conventional means.

The horse of the 18th century was the most august of beasts, especially among the British, among whom it was virtually revered. But George Stubbs dared to pit this noble beast against the exotic one, executing, in the process, one of the most awe-inspiring, majestic pieces of animal art ever painted.

"Horse Attacked by a Lion," like its cousin, "Horse Devoured By a Lion," is a massive, carnivorous work of monumental ambitions and, some might say, unsettling depravity. But it is a masterpiece of authorship and a seminal piece of work in the canon of George Stubbs, the British painter, engraver and anatomist whose passionate scenes of horses attacked by lions still elicit terror.

In executing it, the British painter presaged the era of the Romantics, who worshipped all things visceral, and articulated a new expression of the sublime, a definition of which provokes us still.

In the breathtaking exhibit, "George Stubbs in the Collection of Paul Mellon: A Memorial Exhibition," at the Yale Center for British Art, the works of this grand and grandly underappreciated artist are adoringly celebrated. The haste with which the exhibit was assembled -to honor the center’s patron, collector Paul Mellon, who died in February -has not detracted from this breathtaking and elegant exhibit. The Yale Center for British Art is, as director Patrick McCaughey said, "the heart and home of Stubbs" and here he is celebrated with both familial understanding and artistic discernment.

The millstone of the artist George Stubbs has always been that he was merely a painter of horses. Such subject matter was decidedly low on the artistic hierarchy, which elevated history and genre painters and portraitists but dismissed painters of the lower forms of life. But Stubbs, a man of vigorous intellect and unflagging curiosity, was doing more than painting horses. He was celebrating a new vision of awe, and advocating a philosophical view of the wilderness as integral to humanity. In the world of George Stubbs, man and beast not only exist simultaneously, but sympathetically and even symbiotically, with each making the other more noble than he would have been without them.

In the four "Shooting" pictures that greet visitors on their entrance to the exhibit, two friends from town set out with their two dogs on an auspicious morning for a hunt. This quartet, more than any other in the exhibit, delightfully transmits three of Stubbs’ most prominent themes: the relationship of man to nature; of men to animals and of men to one another. These two friends have escaped from the "smoky town" to an oasis of purity, with their respective loyal dogs and their shotguns to embrace the sporting night. They are braided into nature both by their physical immersion in it and by the intercession, as it were, of their dogs, who are both nature and apart from it. Their friendship is accentuated by the tender glow of morning and mid-afternoon. The dogs marry their masters’ movements; when the man sits, the dog sits; when the man stands, the dog stands, too.

The pairing of men and dogs was not new in British painting; perhaps no culture has painted as many dogs and horses as the British. But the reverence with which Stubbs treats the beasts and the accuracy with which he depicts them are revolutionary.

Most revolutionary, however, was Stubbs’ embrace of the idea of the sublime, as articulated by Edmund Burke. Burke, the Irish theorist who was a supporter of American independence, began his career as a philosopher. His treatise, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful," published in 1757, was taken to heart by philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Denis Diderot -and by painter George Stubbs.

What makes art sublime? Two factors, said Burke. First, it must be beautiful. Second, it must be awe-inspiring, and awe is frequently inspired by terror. The idea that terror and art could coalesce into the sublime is one that finds its way into the debate over much of modern art, but in the 18th century it was a revolutionary theory.

In Burke’s view, danger is as captivating as delight. The fear that Stubbs sparks in his lion and horse paintings was even more attenuated in 1763. This is, after all, a dozen years before the birth of Jane Austen, to whom such victimization and savagery would be unthinkable. But as the British Empire expanded, it became not only thinkable, but possible. The empire was expanding into all sorts of far-flung locales, bringing not only exotic materials, but equally exotic animals back to Britain.

The menagerie that was shipped to London was plenty to shock the British, and the idea of coupling the savage with the serene, as Stubbs did, seems, in retrospect, a natural syllogism.

That is not to say that Stubbs painted only lions, tigers and bears preying on the vulnerable English natives. Although as curator Malcom Warner says, Stubbs’ idea of combining beauty with fear presaged the modern horror film, Stubbs is just as delighted to show the wild animals in elegant repose. Here the beasts recline in the dark wood, as with "Tiger" or pose anachronistically in the impeccable British forest, as in "Zebra."

It is easy to presume that William Blake may have seen Stubbs’ "Tiger" and been transfixed enough to pen his immortal "Tiger, Tiger, burning bright" poem. What immortal hand or eye, indeed. The paintings and the engravings are velvety in their boldness and precise in their detail. Not only lions and tigers but also cheetahs and leopards formed part of his compendium of wild beasts. But Stubbs’ depiction of both the tiger and the zebra is one of anatomical precision as well as astonished reverence.

Both were integral to the development of Stubbs as an artist. More than one art historian has called Stubbs England’s da Vinci. Just as da Vinci did, Stubbs learned anatomy through cadavers. Some of his first works were drawings of the female womb and fetus, to which he had access after one such female patient of a physician friend of Stubbs died in childbirth.

And among his first artistic explorations was the detailed anatomy of the horse, which he arrived at through an equally revolting method. In this case, the end justified the means, as Stubbs’ horses have all the candor and precision of a photograph, but with the artist’s sense of majesty and compassion. To Stubbs, these are not merely noble, but sentient beasts, a position that he stresses with his glorious paintings of dogs. But the horse, with its subtle variations and good breeding, its discrete, courtly bearing was England. Situating these horses as he does in the undulating British countryside lends a sense of identity to the British, in much the same way as Constable’s landscapes or Turner’s seascapes did. Man threaded through beast, both physically and allegorically, is so frequent a Stubbs motif that even in his late genre paintings, like "The Laborers" and The Reapers," executed on Wedgwood enamel, dogs and horses appear essential to the scene.

And yet in what is probably the last painting Stubbs completed, the artist comes to a remarkably different conclusion. In the enigmatic "Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon’s Gamekeeper With A Dying Doe and A Hound," the game keeper has just shot a doe and holds it by the neck, ready to slash its throat with his knife. The noses of the faithful dog and dying deer almost meet and the expression of glee on the dog’s face and death on the deer’s are a stunning contrast, as is the gameskeeper, holding death with one hand and love with the other. The expression on the gamekeeper’s face is a bit like that of a deer caught in the headlights.

Or perhaps it is simply that of a dying painter, struggling with issues of coexistence, wondering whether there might be another way.

Tracey O’Shaughnessy won first place in Division I for papers with circulation up to 75,000. She is associate features editor at the Republican-American in Waterbury, CT.

She edits, writes two columns a week and also is a feature writer. She was graduated Magna Cum Laude from American University. After college, O’Shaughnessy worked at Gannett News Service in Washington, D.C., the Norwich Bulletin in Connecticut and the Almanac Newspapers in Potomac, Md. She studied both writing and theology at Georgetown University and now attends Wesleyan University in pursuit of a master’s degree in liberal arts. She came to the Waterbury Republican in 1994. She has won local and national awards for her column and her art criticism.