A Lion Attacking a Horse

George Stubbs painted A Lion Attacking a Horse around 1762, one of his series of violent predator-prey subjects that introduced the Burkean sublime into the otherwise ordered world of equestrian portraiture. The lion-and-horse subjects — which Stubbs repeated across paintings, drawings, and prints throughout his career — depart radically from the dignified naturalistic observation of his commissioned horse portraits into a territory of pure instinctual violence and terror. The horse's posture of extreme panic — mouth open in a scream, body twisted in flight — contrasts with the lion's contained, predatory concentration. The works were interpreted by contemporaries through the language of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.

Stubbs combines his anatomical precision with dramatic intensity, rendering both animals with scientific accuracy even in this violent encounter. The muscular tension in both creatures is depicted with the knowledge gained from his pioneering dissection studies.