A Blackbuck

Stubbs painted this blackbuck in 1775 for the Hunterian Museum collection, as one of several Indian and Asian ungulates he documented for John Hunter's natural history enterprise. The blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) was among the most spectacular Indian antelopes, the male distinguished by its dramatic spiral horns and striking dark-brown-and-white coat. By the 1770s, live blackbucks had been kept in English aristocratic menageries, and Stubbs had access to a specimen he could study directly. The painting belongs to his sustained programme of exotic animal documentation, placed alongside his studies of nilgai, moose, rhinoceros, and yak in what amounts to a visual natural history of rare fauna. The Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow holds the painting as part of its collection of scientific and artistic material associated with John Hunter's estate.

Oil on canvas. The blackbuck's dramatic dorsal colouration — dark chocolate brown above, sharply divided from white below — presents a stronger tonal contrast than most of Stubbs's animal subjects. He handles the division between dark and light coat areas with a crisp, clean edge, consistent with the species' actual pattern. The spiral horns are rendered in careful three-quarter view to show their full double-corkscrew form.