Lustre, held by a Groom

Lustre, Held by a Groom from 1762 by George Stubbs depicts a named horse in the horse-and-groom format that was his most commercially reliable composition type in the early 1760s. Lustre was a racehorse of the period whose name—evoking the gleam of a well-groomed coat—Stubbs would have rendered precisely, capturing the specific quality of sheen and coloring that gave the animal its identity. The groom-holds-horse composition, repeated in many variations throughout his career, creates a stable format within which each specific animal's individuality can be documented. Stubbs's equine paintings combine the anatomical precision gained from his seven-year dissection project with compositional elegance informed by classical sculpture, producing a template that served his clients' documentary requirements while satisfying academic standards of pictorial organization. The work is held at the Yale Center for British Art.

The horse and groom are depicted with Stubbs's characteristic precision, the animal's build and coloring carefully rendered.