Self Portrait on a White Hunter

This extraordinary 1782 self-portrait at the Lady Lever Art Gallery shows Stubbs presenting himself as a gentleman rider atop a white hunter — an image calculated to assert his social respectability alongside his artistic identity. Stubbs occupied an ambiguous social position: widely recognised as an artist of genius, he was nevertheless regarded by some contemporaries as primarily a craftsman and by the Royal Academy — of which he eventually became a fellow — with persistent ambivalence. Presenting himself on horseback merged the identity of the painter with that of his most celebrated subject matter: the horse. The white hunter is clearly a specific, carefully observed animal rather than a generic mount, and Stubbs renders the horse with the same anatomical precision he gave to his greatest commissions. The landscape background is one of his most atmospheric, with a stormy sky and distant light that gives the composition an unusual romantic grandeur. It is among the most personally revealing works in Stubbs's entire output.

Oil on canvas. The composition adopts the traditional equestrian portrait format associated with aristocratic sitters — Van Dyck's Charles I on horseback being the remote precedent — and appropriates it for self-representation. The white horse is modelled in cool greys and blue-whites, maximising contrast against the stormy brown-grey sky. Stubbs's own figure is painted with the same objectivity he applied to portrait sitters.