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It was the now vanished tone of 18th century landed society—fenced about with deadly capital statutes, but also bound intimately together by chains of patronage running vertically through the classes—that enabled Stubbs to paint his admirably varied theater of land work, from haymakers to grooms, trainers and jockeys, without the least sign of overt condescension. Across the Channel, patrons liked pictures of drunken, vomiting peasants in the Dutch manner: a class zoo. Not in England, where Stubbs painted the cult of the horse with rapt attention, as a ritual focus of many skills and several mutually dependent classes.
The horse was his chief image of social harmony: order on four legs. No wonder that, in such paintings as Eclipse at Newmarket, With a Groom and a Jockey, circa 1770, the plain rubbing-down houses on Newmarket Heath look like neo-Egyptian shrines, pyramids of the turf. They are, so to speak, the temples of Stubbs' Utopia, a place adjacent to Jonathan Swift's imaginary country of the Houyhnhnms, those sagacious and moralizing horses.
Horses not only had ideal attributes in this scheme of things, they also made plausible heroes. The great example is Stubbs' prosaically titled Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, 1800. Hambletonian, winner of both the St. Leger and the Doncaster Gold Cup in 1796, belonged 3 to a rich and deep-gambling young baronet named Sir Henry Vane-Tempest. In 1799 Vane-Tempest put him up against Diamond, another star horse, for a purse of 3,000 guineas. (At the time, a farmer's laborer might have made the equivalent of five guineas a year.) The match drew the biggest crowd and the heaviest side-betting ever seen at Newmarket, and amid scenes of hysterical excitement Hambletonian won the four-mile race by half a neck. He finished "shockingly goaded," lathered in blood from whip and spur. To commemorate the victory, Vane-Tempest had the 7 5-year-old Stubbs paint him life size.
The result was not only the largest canvas of Stubbs' career but the grandest in structure and, to modern eyes, the most suggestive. That immense, glossy brown frame of the horse, floating across one's whole field of vision, has the compulsive power of a dream image. In the interest of decorum, Stubbs left out the wounds and weals on Hambletonian's flanks, but his sympathies remained with the animal: white slaver flecks his mouth, the ears lie back flat, and the pink tongue lolls in the aftermath of exhaustion. The creature is attended, none too reverently, by brown pragmatic dwarfs. One cannot imagine that a more rhetorical horse—one of Rubens' baroque equine wardrobes, say, all flourishing hoofs and cascading mane—could possess the same intensity. Hambletonian may have been sired by a classical frieze, but his only foal would be the horse in Guernica, thrusting its outraged neck toward the indifferent sky of the 20th century. —By Robert Hughes