Scientist of the Day - George Stubbs
George Stubbs, an English artist, was born Aug. 25, 1724. Stubbs was one of the great animal painters of the late 18th century. His specialty was horses, especially horses getting chewed up by lions, a macabre scene for which he seemed to have a special fondness; we see here a painting on this theme in the Yale Center for British Art (see first image above). His horse paintings are so lifelike because Stubbs made a special study of horse anatomy, and even published a beautiful book on the subject, The Anatomy of the Horse (1766), a copy of which we have in our History of Science Collection.
However, occasionally Stubbs got a call to paint more unusual animals. In 1770, The Duke of Richmond was presented with a young bull moose from Canada, the first to make its way to England. The anatomist William Hunter commissioned Stubbs to sketch the animal, and the result was a splendid oil painting, now in the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow (second image). Since this juvenile was too young to have antlers, Stubbs thoughtfully included in his painting a set of antlers from a full-grown moose that had been given to the Duke as well. Stubbs’ moose was later engraved and included in Thomas Pennant's Arctic Zoology (1784), which we include here, because the engraver endowed the moose with a very charming set of eyelashes (third image).
Shortly after Stubbs painted the moose, Joseph Banks returned from Captain Cook's first voyage, and among the specimens he brought back was the skin of a kangaroo. Stubbs did quite a credible job breathing life into this former bounder from Down Under (fourth image). This painting was also turned into an engraving and later appeared in the Narrative of the Cook voyage (1773; fifth image). We displayed the engraving in our 2002 exhibition, Voyages: Scientific Circumnavigations.
William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.
