Ambrosio, a bay stallion, the property of Thomas Haworth

Painted in 1804, this portrait of 'Ambrosio', a bay stallion belonging to Thomas Haworth, is a late work executed when Stubbs was in his late seventies and still producing equine portraits of high quality. The very late date is significant: Stubbs outlived most of his major contemporaries and continued to accept horse commissions almost to his death in 1806. By 1804, the Romantic period was underway and younger painters like Géricault in France were beginning to reimagine the horse as a vehicle for emotional and dramatic expression quite different from Stubbs's analytical approach. Yet Stubbs maintained his documentary precision and compositional clarity to the end. Thomas Haworth was likely a horse-owner and breeder rather than one of the great racing aristocrats, suggesting that by his final years Stubbs's practice extended widely through the horse-owning classes rather than being confined to the nobility.

Oil on canvas. The late work shows no significant diminishment of Stubbs's core abilities: the horse is presented in crisp profile, the anatomy clearly stated, the coat modelled in his characteristic warm-cool glazing sequence. Perhaps the handling is slightly freer than his middle-period precision, but the fundamental observational approach is unchanged.