Pangloss

Pangloss from 1762 by George Stubbs is a horse portrait named after a famous racehorse. Stubbs's individual horse portraits were prized by owners who wished to commemorate their most valued animals with the same care given to family portraits. Stubbs painted primarily in oil on canvas and board, achieving a distinctive cool clarity through a careful layered technique built over a white ground. His seven years of dissecting horses in a remote Lincolnshire farmhouse gave his animal painting an ...

The horse is rendered with Stubbs's characteristic anatomical exactitude, every muscle and tendon depicted with scientific precision born from his dissection studies.