Hollyhock

Hollyhock from 1768 by George Stubbs is a horse portrait documenting a named individual animal. Such individual horse portraits served as records of prized animals, comparable to human family portraits in the households of the sporting aristocracy. 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 paintin...

The horse is rendered with Stubbs's characteristic anatomical exactitude, the individual animal's conformation carefully documented.