A Grey Horse

George Stubbs's A Grey Horse (1793) is a late work by England's greatest animal painter, demonstrating the sustained quality of his observation and technique into old age. A grey horse against a dark background or landscape was one of Stubbs's characteristic compositional formulas — the horse isolated and illuminated with almost scientific clarity, its anatomy rendered with the knowledge derived from his famous dissections. The Royal Collection holds this work, appropriate for a painter who devoted much of his career to the horses of the British aristocracy and Royal Family.

Stubbs's rendering of the grey coat — with its complex mixture of white, silver, and dark guard hairs — demonstrates his extraordinary ability to describe surface texture. The horse's musculature is rendered with the anatomical knowledge he gained from the systematic dissections recorded in The Anatomy of the Horse (1766). The setting is minimal, focusing attention entirely on the animal.