The Kimbell Art Museum’s director discusses a fine specimen from George Stubbs’s Mares and Foals series recently added to the collection.
The paintings of English equestrian artist George Stubbs and the architecture of Louis I. Kahn make perfect complements—similarly quiet and straightforward with an underlying but never overt classicism. The harmony between the two was proven long ago at Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art, which houses the large collection of works by Stubbs formed by Paul Mellon. Now, the Kimbell Art Museum has acquired Stubbs’s spectacular Mares and Foals Belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, of about 1761–1762, and it hangs in the museum’s celebrated Kahn Building. Over six feet wide and in superb condition, the painting joins another by Stubbs already in the Kimbell’s collection, Lord Grosvenor’s Arabian Stallion with a Groom of about 1765.
The Kimbell’s new acquisition features carefully observed portraits of three brood mares and their young offspring. The empathy Stubbs felt for the animals and his understanding of their psychology is palpable. The painting also demonstrates Stubbs’s mastery of equine anatomy, an ability fortified by eighteen months spent dissecting horses in a barn in Lincolnshire, beginning in 1756. Stubbs made drawings of these dissections, which he later engraved for his book The Anatomy of the Horse, published in 1766. This scientific approach to the study of horses places Stubbs firmly within the Age of Enlightenment.
Mares and Foals Belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke is one of a group of at least ten innovative paintings Stubbs made on the Mares and Foals theme in the 1760s and ’70s. The paintings show the horses in frieze-like formats and have become, along with Whistlejacket in the National Gallery, London, among the artist’s best known and most admired works. The Bolingbroke Mares and Foals is likely the earliest of the group and probably the one exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1762, the year Stubbs painted Whistlejacket.
Before the Mares and Foals paintings, when artists portrayed horses belonging to racing enthusiasts, they typically depicted prize racehorses mounted by their jockeys. Breaking with this visual tradition, Stubbs’s Mares and Foals paintings give behind-the-scenes glimpses of the back-to-nature life of the stud farm. These images of mothers with their young in a natural setting reflect the eighteenth-century cult of motherhood and its emphasis on the importance of maternal nurturing.
Each of the Mares and Foals paintings is a variation on the frieze-like format. The Bolingbroke canvas, one of the most powerful of the series, adds subtle drama absent in the other Mares and Foals paintings: two of the mares look anxious, alert to the prospect of an approaching storm, suggested by darkening clouds, and protective of their foals, who seem oblivious to any possible danger. The apprehension of these mares may also stem from the presence of the picture’s viewer, since two of the mares stare directly out of the canvas, unique among the horses of the Mares and Foals series.
The central mare is flanked by two horses on the left and three on the right, underneath a framing tree. A band of gray water between the greens of the landscape serves to unify and link visually all twenty-four—yes, twenty-four!—horse legs. The grouping on the right features twelve legs, a collection that some critics have called cluttered, but which also constitutes an exceedingly graceful passage in the painting and gives a sense of naturalism. This contrasts with the composition of the famous, unusual Mares and Foals without a Background, which was painted around the same time as the Bolingbroke Mares and Foals. The seven horses in the former are spread out evenly in an arabesque pattern that gives an impression of decorative elegance very different from the naturalism of the Kimbell’s new acquisition.
The verdure of the landscape and age of the young horses indicate that the time of year depicted is late spring. The setting of the painting is presumably the Bolingbroke estate at Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire, as evidenced by another Stubbs painting for Bolingbroke featuring a similar body of water within a landscape that shows the house and church of Lydiard Tregoze in the distance.
The 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, famous for his race-horses and notorious for his extravagant lifestyle, was among Stubbs’s most important patrons and commissioned ten paintings from the artist. When Bolingbroke and Stubbs first met is unknown, though it could have been while they were in Rome simultaneously in 1754. Regardless, Bolingbroke was part of a circle of aristocrats who became Stubbs’s primary patrons from the late 1750s through at least the following decade. These aristocrats were linked by their Whig politics, involvement in horse-racing, and membership in the Jockey Club. All the Mares and Foals paintings were commissioned by members of this circle.
Mares and Foals Belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke remained in Bolingbroke’s family until his descendants sold it at auction in 1943, after which it entered the collection of Mrs. John Arthur Dewar of the whiskey distillery family, who also owned the Kimbell’s masterpiece by Henry Raeburn, The Allen Brothers, which the museum acquired in 2002. The Kimbell purchased Mares and Foals from a private collection through the art dealers Dickinson. The acquisition was made in memory of the Kimbell’s longtime board member and leader Ben J. Fortson.
