1724-1806 George Stubbs Galleries George Stubbs (born in Liverpool on August 25, 1724 ?C died in London July 10, 1806) was a British painter, best known for his paintings of horses. Stubbs was the son of a currier. Information on his life up to age thirty-five is sparse, relying almost entirely on notes made by fellow artist Ozias Humphry towards the end of Stubbs's life. Stubbs was briefly apprenticed to a Lancashire painter and engraver named Hamlet Winstanley, but soon left as he objected to the work of copying to which he was set. Thereafter as an artist he was self-taught. In the 1740s he worked as a portrait painter in the North of England and from about 1745 to 1751 he studied human anatomy at York County Hospital. He had had a passion for anatomy from his childhood, and one of his earliest surviving works is a set of illustrations for a textbook on midwifery which was published in 1751. In 1755 Stubbs visited Italy. Forty years later he told Ozias Humphry that his motive for going to Italy was, "to convince himself that nature was and is always superior to art whether Greek or Roman, and having renewed this conviction he immediately resolved upon returning home". Later in the 1754 he rented a farmhouse in the village of Horkstow,Lincolnshire, and spent 18 months dissecting horses. He moved to London in about 1759 and in 1766 published The anatomy of the Horse. The original drawings are now in the collection of the Royal Academy. Even before his book was published, Stubbs's drawings were seen by leading aristocratic patrons, who recognised that his work was more accurate than that of earlier horse painters such as James Seymour and John Wootton. In 1759 the 3rd Duke of Richmond commissioned three large pictures from him, and his career was soon secure. By 1763 he had produced works for several more dukes and other lords and was able to buy a house in Marylebone, a fashionable part of London, where he lived for the rest of his life. Whistlejacket. National Gallery, London.His most famous work is probably Whistlejacket, a painting of a prancing horse commissioned by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, which is now in the National Gallery in London. This and two other paintings carried out for Rockingham break with convention in having plain backgrounds. Throughout the 1760s he produced a wide range of individual and group portraits of horses, sometimes accompanied by hounds. He often painted horses with their grooms, whom he always painted as individuals. Meanwhile he also continued to accept commissions for portraits of people, including some group portraits. From 1761 to 1776 he exhibited at the Society of Artists, but in 1775 he switched his allegiance to the recently founded but already more prestigious Royal Academy. Stubbs also painted more exotic animals including lions, tigers, giraffes, monkeys, and rhinoceroses, which he was able to observe in private menageries. He became preoccupied with the theme of a wild horse threatened by a lion and produced several variations on this theme. These and other works became well known at the time through engravings of Stubbs's work, which appeared in increasing numbers in the 1770s and 1780s. Mares and Foals in a Landscape. 1763-68.Stubbs also painted historical pictures, but these are much less well regarded. From the late 1760s he produced some work on enamel. In the 1770s Josiah Wedgwood developed a new and larger type of enamel panel at Stubbs's request. Also in the 1770s he painted single portraits of dogs for the first time, while also receiving an increasing number of commissions to paint hunts with their packs of hounds. He remained active into his old age. In the 1780s he produced a pastoral series called Haymakers and Reapers, and in the early 1790s he enjoyed the patronage of the Prince of Wales, whom he painted on horseback in 1791. His last project, begun in 1795, was A comparative anatomical exposition of the structure of the human body with that of a tiger and a common fowl, engravings from which appeared between 1804 and 1806. Stubbs's son George Townly Stubbs was an engraver and printmaker.  Related Paintings of George Stubbs :. | The Milbanke and Melbourne Families | A Lion Attacking a Horse | The Grosvenor Hunt | A Lion Attacking a Horse | Green Monkey |
Related Artists:
Gwen John
Welsh 1876-1939 Gwen John was born in Haverfordwest, Wales, the second of four children of Edwin William John and his wife Augusta (nee Smith). Edwin John was a solicitor whose dour temperament cast a chill over his family, and Augusta was often absent from the children due to ill health, leaving her two sisters??stern Salvationists??to take her place in the household. Despite the considerable tension in the family (who became known as "those turbulent Johns") the children's interest in literature and art was encouraged. Following the mother??s premature death in 1884, the family moved to Tenby in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Although she painted and drew from an early age, her earliest surviving work dates from her nineteenth year. From 1895?C98, she studied at the Slade School of Art, where her younger brother, Augustus John, had begun his studies in 1894. During this period they shared living quarters, and further reduced their expenses by subsisting on a diet of nuts and fruit. Even as a student, Augustus' brilliant draughtsmanship and personal glamour made him a celebrity, and stood in contrast to Gwen's quieter gifts and reticent demeanour. While he greatly admired her art, Augustus offered her advice which she ignored; he urged her to take a "more athletic attitude to life", and cautioned her against what he saw as the "unbecoming and unhygienic negligence" of her mode of living, but her entire life was marked by a disregard for her physical well-being. In 1898 she made her first visit to Paris with two friends from the Slade, and while there she studied under James McNeill Whistler at the Academie Carmen. She returned to London in 1899, and spent the next four years in austere circumstances. When she exhibited her work for the first time in 1900, at the New English Art Club (NEAC), her address was a derelict building where she was living illegally.
Henry J Morgan
painted HMS 'Comus' in 1899
caspar netscher
Caspar (or Gaspar) Netscher (Heidelberg, 1639 ?C Den Haag, January 15, 1684) was a Dutch portrait and genre painter. He was a master in depicting oriental rugs, silk and brocade and introduced an international style to the Northern Netherlands. Little is know of Netscher's early years. According to Arnold Houbraken's 17th century biographical study of Dutch painters he was born in Heidelberg or Prague. His father Johann Netscher probably was a sculptor from Stuttgart who died in Poland when he was two years of age. It is also suggested that Caspar may have been the son of a Rotterdam painter. His mother, fleeing from the dangers of a civil war, carried him to Arnhem. On her way two of her children died. In Arnhem he was adopted by a physician named A. Tullekens. At first he was destined for the profession of his patron, but owing to his great aptitude for painting he was placed under a local artist named Hendrick Coster, and in 1654 became a student of Ter Borch in Deventer, who had family connections to Tullekens. He was Ter Borch's most gifted pupil, probably worked as an assistant as well and he appears several times as a model on Ter Borch's paintings. The Lace-Maker by Caspar Netscher (1662), oil on canvas, 33 x 27 cm. Wallace Collection, LondonIn 1658 he set out for Italy to complete his education there. However, he didn't get farther south than Bordeaux that fall, where he married Margaretha Godijn in 1659. There he toiled hard to earn a livelihood by painting small cabinet pictures which are now highly valued on account of their exquisite finish. After moving to The Hague in 1662, possibly because of the prosecutions of Protestants, he turned his attention to portrait-painting. In this branch of his art was more successful. In 1668 he joined the Schutterij and Cosimo III de' Medici, traveling through the Netherlands bought four paintings. It is likely that Netscher knew the painters Frans van Mieris, Sr. (1635 -1681) and Gerard Dou, but it is certain that he knew the painter Gerrit de Hooch from The Hague as his wife gave her name to Gerrit's new born daughter Margarita in 1676, the event being witnessed by Caspar as well as his wife. He was patronized by William III, and his earnings soon enabled him to gratify his own taste by depicting musical and conversational pieces.