George Stubbs: ‘all done from Nature’
George Stubbs: ‘all done from Nature’ presents the first significant overview of Stubbs’s work in Britain for more than 30 years and brings together 80 paintings, drawings and publications from the National Gallery’s Whistlejacket to pieces never previously seen in public.
Stubbs produced exceptional images of animals and people throughout his career. These were a product of his keen scientific eye and uncommon sense of compassion. Rather than trust to history and the untested example of his precursors, he championed doing as a way of thinking and deployed picture-making in pursuit of reality.
On the title page of The Anatomy of the Horse, his groundbreaking publication that rewrote our understanding of equine biology, Stubbs confirmed that everything that followed was ‘all done from Nature’ – meaning that it all derived from his own painstaking analysis of the subject in front of him.
George Stubbs: ‘all done from Nature’ accompanies the major exhibition at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and the Mauritshuis in The Hague and includes new writing on the artist by Nicholas Clee, Martin Myrone, Martin Postle, Roger Robinson, Jenny Uglow and Alison E. Wright.
Anthony Spira, Martin Postle, Paul Bonaventura
October 2019
Paperback, 260 x 216 mm
224 pages, 150 colour illus.
ISBN: 978-1-911300-68-7
Exhibition
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
11 October 2019 – 26 January 2020Mauritshuis, the Hague
20 February – 1 June 2020In the press
"★★★★★ Fascinating ...follows his gallop from largely self-taught portraitist to so-called “Liverpudlian Leonardo” ... Stubbs emerges not only as a giant of 18th century British art, but as a radical innovator whose concerns chime with those of our own times." —Telegraph
"Fascinating ... this excellent [survey] opens with birth and closes with death. In between are horses aplenty, but also a whole menagerie of other creatures, familiar and exotic, recorded both living and anatomised with a skill perhaps equalled only by Leonardo." –Country Life
"Reveal[s] his mastery of anatomy and deep love of the animal world" –The Times
"Substantial ... sparkling essays." —World of Interiors
"★★★★ Wonderful ... the artist celebrated for his paintings of horses was no less adept at other animals." —Guardian
"Superb survey" –New Statesman
"A glorious menagerie" –The Arts Desk
"Confirms the Liverpudlian Leonardo’s position as one of the 18th century’s greatest artists ... Stubbs’s evident delight in, and respect for, animals seems especially pertinent in our era of extinction." –Studio International
"The first significant overview of the artist’s work in Britain for more than 30 years and brings together 80 paintings, drawings and publications, from the National Gallery’s Whistlejacket to works never seen before in public." —Evening Standard
"a substantial and good-looking catalogue" —The Burlington Magazine