Mr Dawson of Retford with His Servant

Painted in 1749 as the companion to the portrait of Mrs Dawson and her daughter, this canvas of Mr Dawson of Retford with his servant at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull is a remarkable early work by Stubbs on multiple counts. The inclusion of a servant beside the landed gentleman was a conventional marker of social status, but the degree of attention Stubbs gives to the servant's face and bearing is unusual: the servant is not a mere accessory but a fully realised presence. Stubbs was, in the late 1740s, already demonstrating the observational habits that would make him one of Britain's greatest animal painters — habits of seeing that treated every subject, human or animal, with the same empirical seriousness. The Retford area of Nottinghamshire was prosperous farming country, and the Dawson family's wealth likely derived from agricultural land. The portraits as a pair give a complete picture of prosperous provincial Georgian life.

Oil on canvas. The two-figure composition is handled as a partial conversation piece, with the servant positioned slightly behind and lower than the master, establishing social hierarchy through spatial arrangement rather than size difference. Stubbs gives both faces convincing individual likenesses, a significant technical achievement for a twenty-five-year-old painter.