A Horse Affrighted by a Lion

George Stubbs specialized in painting horses, and he frequently invested his compositions with Romantic flair by including ravenous predators and dark and stormy vistas. As seen here, his prints offered appropriately stark contrasts for these imaginative subjects while maintaining a sense of the dramatic; yet his practice of animal portraiture was in fact based on close anatomical study. His oversize 1766 book Anatomy of the Horse included a series of crosssection prints of horses in various poses, showing every layer from a horse’s silky hide to its skeleton.