Brief Biography-George Stubbs was surprisingly a self-taught artist. He was born in Liverpool, the son of a currier and leather merchant. He worked briefly for Hamlet Winstanley, the engraver, copying paintings at Knowsley Hall outside Liverpool. He fell out with his master over which pictures to copy and vowed never to reproduce other artists’ works again but to study from nature only. In Leeds, he worked as a portrait painter and from there, he went to York, where he studied anatomy. Doctor John Burton commissioned him to engrave his treatise on midwifery. Stubbs produced some of the engravings from his anatomical study of a dead woman. He was renowned for dissecting humans and animals.
In 1754, he visited Italy as he felt obliged to do what other artists did. There he observed the works of the renaissance artists and promptly returned to England; nature, to him, was his only master. He stayed in Lincolnshire when he returned and spent his time painting portraits and dissecting horses to prepare for his book The Anatomy of a Horse.
Stubbs went to London in 1760, where he settled with his common-law wife, Mary Spencer, and his son George. It took him until 1766 to complete his etchings and publish his work. Nevertheless, it gained him a reputation throughout Europe in science and art. He received numerous commissions from the racing fraternity, and Joshua Reynolds who became a patron, held his works in high esteem. His lion and horse paintings were a prevalent subject, and his most famous painting is that of the horse Whistlejacket. In 1781, the Royal Academy made him a Royal Academician, a title he had long awaited. He was, however, to argue with the academy over the hanging of his enamel works a year later, which denied him his title. Despite gaining Royal commissions, he struggled financially in his later years. He embarked on a new anatomical book, A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl. He died in 1806, before the whole book’s publication. Miss Spencer inherited all his property.