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Stubbs painted quite a few such marvels (though not, alas, the Arabian nightwalker or the Spotted Negro). He portrayed lemurs, monkeys, a rhinoceros and several leopards, and foreign animals gave him the pretext for two of his greatest images. One of these was a painting of a cheetah that had been sent to London as a gift to George III from a former governor-general of Madras. It is a marvel of detached observation. In straightforwardness and dignity, unblemished by caricature, the heads of the animal's two Indian handlers rank with Rubens' famous studies of an African black. The evocation of substance, from the hair of the cheetah—done in a rippling amber pelt of short directional strokes interspersed with broader whiskery featherings—to the play of light on the white turbans and dhotis, is breathtaking.
The second exotic subject is more mysterious, almost surreal. It is a zebra mare, which had been brought from the Cape of Good Hope and given to Queen Charlotte in 1762. This "painted African, ass," the first seen in England, was installed in the royal menagerie at Buckingham Gate. When he came to paint it, Stubbs set it in an English wood, its black-and-white hide in almost shocking contrast to the green tunnels of boscage and filtered shade that stretch behind it. It is as though one had taken a wrong turn in the Forest of Arden and encountered a mildly grazing apparition from another world.
Like all great artists, Stubbs was quite unsentimental, and his work reminds us what a recent invention the idea that "animals are only human" really is. His animals are always presented in the full "otherness" of their animal nature. He kept to this even when painting that traditional focus of woozy emotion, the dog. Stubbs rendered the lean ferocity of the staghound, or the compact, questing efficiency of the foxhound, with perfect respect for their actual being as creatures in their own world. Even when he did pets—as in Fino and Tiny, circa 1791, which is dominated by a superbly rhythmical profile of the Prince of Wales' black-and-white spitz Fino—he set down their complicated markings and baroque puffs of newly washed hair with a measured, objective enthusiasm that transcended any hint of cuteness.
Of course, there is pathos in Stubbs' hunting scenes. His portrait of the Earl of Clarendon's gamekeeper about to cut a doe's throat in a darkening wood is a gravely haunting mixture of the archaic and the matter-of-fact. Venison, to be eaten, must be killed, but the thickening shadows seem to enfold a more sacrificial rite than the mere stocking of a larder. This, like all Stubbs' paintings, must also be seen as a manifesto of the supreme ideology of late 18th century England: the celebration and defense of property. If the wrong person killed that doe, he would be transported or hanged.