Horse and Lioness

George Stubbs was the supreme painter of horses in British art — his scientific study of equine anatomy, demonstrated in The Anatomy of the Horse (1766), gave his animal paintings an authority no contemporary could rival. The undated Horse and Lioness, now at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, belongs to a series of lion-and-horse compositions that Stubbs returned to throughout his career. These subjects — a horse being attacked by a lion — were among the most psychologically charged works of his career, departing from the calm zoological precision of his stable scenes to explore themes of prey and predator, fear and violence. Stubbs is thought to have encountered a real horse being attacked by a lion in Morocco during his travels, though the truth of this account has been questioned. Whatever its origin, the lion-and-horse theme generated some of his most emotionally intense compositions, and the series spans his career from the 1760s to the 1790s. The Walker Art Gallery holds a significant collection of British art, and Stubbs's presence in the collection reflects Liverpool's historical connections to the horse-racing and agricultural worlds that sustained his patronage.

Stubbs deploys his unmatched anatomical knowledge to render both horse and lioness with scientific precision even within an emotionally heightened subject. The horse's muscular fear and the lioness's controlled predatory power are both observed with the objective attention he brought to all animal subjects. The paint surface is characteristically smooth and enamel-like, Stubbs having developed a technique that produced exceptional clarity of animal form.