The Reverend Robert Carter Thelwall and His Family

Completed in 1776 and now at the Holburne Museum in Bath, this group portrait documents Stubbs working in a mode less celebrated than his animal paintings but equally revealing of his ambitions. The Reverend Robert Carter Thelwall was a Lincolnshire clergyman, and the commission placed Stubbs among the gentry portrait painters of the Georgian era — territory usually dominated by Reynolds and Gainsborough. Stubbs's early career in York during the 1740s and 1750s had been largely built on portraiture, and this later family piece shows he had not abandoned the genre. Painted on panel rather than canvas, the work has the precise, slightly enamel-like finish Stubbs favoured for smaller-scale domestic subjects. Family groups of this kind were assertions of social status: the sitters' clothing, their composed arrangement, and the inclusion of a gentle landscape background all signal prosperity and moral order. The painting is an important reminder that Stubbs's clientele extended well beyond horse-owning aristocrats to include prosperous professional men of the church.

The panel support gives the surface a smooth, almost porcelain quality. Stubbs builds up flesh tones in thin, carefully blended layers typical of his portraiture technique, while the landscape background is handled more freely. The figures are arranged in a shallow frieze-like grouping, a compositional formula common to mid-Georgian conversation pieces.