STUBBS, George
(b. 1724, Liverpool, d. 1806, London)

The Milbanke and Melbourne Families

c. 1769
Oil on canvas, 97 x 149 cm
National Gallery, London

Stubbs was born in Liverpool, the son of a leatherseller, and it is tempting to imagine that it was among the tack and harness in his father's shop that he first came into contact with that English world of hunting, racing and horse breeding of which he became the quintessential interpreter. It was a world in which dukes metaphorically rubbed shoulders with stable lads, great landowners with Smithfield meat salesmen, society ladies with Newmarket jockeys, and men and women of all degrees with horses and dogs. 'Master of the art of class distinction', as the art historian Judy Egerton has remarked, he neither flattered nor mocked, but painted with profound 'acceptance of things more or less as they are'. In the words of Mary Spencer, his common-law wife for some fifty years, 'every object in the picture was a Portrait'.

In his effort to paint people truthfully Stubbs studied anatomy at a medical school. The better to portray horses he dissected them, teaching himself engraving to publish The Anatomy of the Horse. Although he may have wished to establish himself as a 'history painter' in the academic mould, he seems to have retained from his trip to Rome in 1754-6 only the memory of an antique marble of a lion attacking a horse. This subject preoccupied him for over thirty years and is the one theme in his work that comes nearest to evoking the 'pity and terror' of epic narrative. Stubbs's gifts of invention had to do not with story-telling but with abstract design.

The poetic effect of Stubbs's combination of dispassionate observation with pattern-making is beautifully demonstrated in this small full-length group portrait of - from left to right - the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Milbanke, her father Sir Ralph Milbanke, her brother John Milbanke, and her husband Sir Peniston Lamb, the future Viscount Melbourne. Although this kind of picture, popular in England in the eighteenth century, was called a 'conversation piece', the human sitters here converse no more than do the light tim-whisky carriage, the horses or Sir Peniston's spaniel. This failing must be the result of Stubbs having studied each figure-group separately from the others, and from a different angle. We may be meant to imagine that the grander Milbankes are welcoming the ineffectual parvenu Sir Peniston. (His promotion to a viscountcy in 1784 was a result of his wife's affair with the Prince of Wales.)

Complete in itself, each vignette - as precise in its delineation of character as it is accurate about costume, complexion, coat, harness, or curvature of wheels seen in perspective - is carefully placed alongside the others to suggest a gracefully meandering yet uninflected line across the painting, along which each person and animal is given equal stress. The frieze is contained within the canvas, turning inwards at the edges. Stubbs often added an imaginary landscape backdrop only after he had satisfactorily deployed his figures, and certainly this is what he must have done here, arranging masses of foliage and cliff, voids of sky, contrapuntally to the figural melody. And that 'vital but endlessly silent' communication among them (in David Piper's beautiful phrase) is forged in the shapes and tones of the spaces around them, the rhythms created by the curving necks and croups of horses, the legs of men and beasts, the sharp accents of tricorn hats, of rose, blue, buff, bay, grey.