Whistlejacket in My Eye

When we commenced the project of reshaping the material in this blog as the heart of a book, one of the first subjects that Nanette Stevenson, the book's designer, raised-- via conference call on Skype (Nanette lives and works in Alaska)-- was artwork for the dust jacket and possibly within the book itself. When she asked if I had any suggestions, I had not yet thought about a dust jacket. As we began to discuss suitable art, my eye fell on a pile of books on my coffee table, and I began fumbling through one, Tamsin Pickeral's The Horse: 30,000 Years of the Horse in Art (Merrell Publishers Limited, London 2006). After flipping through two or three pages, I seized upon a reproduction on page 218 of a 1770 painting by George Stubbs, A Horse Frightened by a Lion.

This Horse Frightened by a Lion is part of the permanent collection of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, where Stubbs grew up. Altogether, Stubbs is known to have produced 17 paintings, including one enamel of which I am aware, on a Romantic horse- versus- lion theme. I saw this particular painting about three-and-a-half years ago at the Frick Museum in New York, when it was one of 17 Stubbs paintings on various subjects on loan in a traveling exhibition in the U.K. and the U.S.

Evidently, Stubbs deliberately portrayed the lions in this series as mangy "demonic mockeries" (page 117, Stubbs & the Horse, Yale University Press 2004). "In Stubbs' world, the horse is first and noblest among animals and the lion at the other end of the scale.... In his later treatments of the theme, Stubbs made the horse white and the lion more shadowy, heightening the sense of good against evil (Ibid.)." To paraphrase the Frick curator's notes, what mattered was not that the lion would inevitably devour the horse, but rather that the horse struggled nobly.

From the time that I was first exposed to Stubbs, he has been my favorite painter of equine scenes. He was one of the first artists to paint famous thoroughbred race horses; and, as a result of gruesome anatomical studies, his understanding of equine anatomy was unmatched by artists in his day. About 1984, I purchased my first art book that featured prominently Stubbs' works, The Horse in Art by John Baskett (George Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd., 1980). My small library contains also a copy of Stubbs' 1766 The Anatomy of the Horse (Dover Publications, Inc. 1970).

Regretably, I have never visited the museum that Paul Mellon established in New Haven, the Yale Center for British Art, which houses most of the 40 Stubbs works that Mr. Mellon, a leading owner and breeder of thoroughbreds, collected during his lifetime. Nor have I ever actually seen my favorite Stubbs painting, the startlingly modern, life-sized, and almost photo-realistic Whistlejacket, acquired in 1997 by the National Gallery, London. But I do have Whistlejacket forever in my mind's eye.