Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/121

 hibited two pictures of ‘Phaeton’ (1762 and 1764), ‘Hercules and Achelous’ (1770), ‘Horse and Lion’ (1763), ‘A Lion seizing a Horse’ (1764), ‘A Lion and Stag’ (1766), ‘A Lion devouring a Stag’ (1767), ‘A Lion devouring a Horse’ (1770), and several others of lions, lionesses, and tigers. In 1775 he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy, his contributions consisting principally of portraits of animals till 1780, when he was elected an associate. In the following year he was elected to full honours, but he resented the application to himself of a rule made subsequent to his election, which requires the presentation of a diploma work to the academy. He refused or neglected to send one, and his election was annulled in a very arbitrary manner, and another was elected in his place. He always maintained that he was entitled to the rank of R.A., but after 1782 he appears in the catalogues as an associate only, except in 1803, when, probably by accident, the initials R.A. are placed after his name. Between 1782 and 1786 he did not send any work to the academy. The contributions of his later years included ‘Reapers’ and ‘Haymakers’ (1786), a pair of genre pictures well known from his own engravings.

In 1771, at the suggestion of his friend Cosway, the miniature-painter, he began to make experiments in enamel, with the view of executing larger pictures in that material than had hitherto been attempted. His first enamels were on copper, one of which, ‘A Lion devouring a Horse,’ was exhibited in 1770. He now went through a course of chemistry, and succeeded in obtaining nineteen colours, and, not being satisfied with the size of the sheets of copper procurable, of which the largest was eighteen inches by fifteen, he applied to Wedgwood & Bentley, the celebrated potters, who, after much trouble and expense, succeeded in producing tablets of pottery three feet six inches by two feet six inches. Partly as a set-off to these expenses, Wedgwood employed Stubbs to paint his father, his wife, and a family piece, and purchased an enamel of ‘Labourers,’ the whole transaction being concluded and the balance paid on 7 May 1796 (, Life of Josiah Wedgwood). He also painted a three-quarter head of Josiah Wedgwood, life size, in enamel, which was engraved by his son George Townley Stubbs and published in 1795.

In 1790 Stubbs undertook to paint for the ‘Turf Review’ all celebrated racehorses, from the Godolphin Arabian down to his own time, and 9,000l. was deposited in a bank for Stubbs to draw upon as his work progressed; but the outbreak of war caused the scheme to be abandoned by its promoters after Stubbs had completed sixteen pictures, including portraits of Eclipse, Gimcrack, Shark, Baronet, and Pumpkin. These were exhibited at the Turf Gallery in Conduit Street in 1794, and all were engraved, fourteen out of the sixteen in two sizes, one to suit the pages of the ‘Review,’ and in a larger size for framing (Sporting Magazine, January 1794). After 1791, in which year he exhibited a portrait of the Prince of Wales and three other works, he did not contribute to the Royal Academy till 1799. He was now seventy-five years of age, but he went on exhibiting till 1803, and in 1800 he exhibited the largest of all his pictures, ‘Hambletonian beating Diamond at Newmarket’ (thirteen feet seven inches by eight feet two inches), which belongs to the Marquis of Londonderry. His last exhibited work was ‘Portrait of a Newfoundland dog, the property of his royal highness the Duke of York.’ In 1803 he was engaged on another anatomical work, of which only three of the six intended parts were completed before his death. It was to have been called ‘A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a common Fowl. In thirty Tables.’ He retained the vigour of his mind and body till the last, and walked eight or nine miles the day before his death, which took place suddenly on 10 July 1806, at his house, 24 Somerset Street, Portman Square, where he had resided since 1763. He was buried at St. Marylebone.

Stubbs was a man of extraordinary energy, industry, and self-reliance. His talents were considerable and various, and his bodily strength very great, although we need not believe the tradition that he carried the whole carcase of a horse on his shoulders up three flights of a narrow staircase to his dissecting-room. Of his private life little is recorded, except that he was an intimate friend of Paul Sandby [q. v.] George Towneley Stubbs [q. v.], the engraver, who was his son, reported that he drank only water for the last forty years of his life. As an animal-painter his reputation was deservedly great, not only with the owners of the horses whose portraits he painted, but also with the public. His ‘heroic’ pictures (like the ‘Phaeton’ and the ‘Horse affrighted by a Lion’) were very popular in the form of prints, some of which were executed by Woollet, Val Green, John Scott, and Hodges, and others by himself and his son. His rustic subjects, like the ‘Farmer's Wife and the Raven,’ ‘Labourers,’ ‘Haymakers,’ and ‘Reapers,’ all engraved by