Baltimore has always been a horse town. Our working men spend more at the track than your average New Yorker any day of the week, and the Preakness Stakes draws crowds from all over the country to our back yard. In this light, the Walters Art Museum's new exhibit, "Stubbs and the Horse," seems somehow appropriate. But more importantly, it will make you feel a very strong, very strange connection with the horse as an animal.
George Stubbs, an 18th century painter known for his portraits of horses, obviously had a strange, spiritual affinity with horses. In Stubbs' most successful paintings, you can detect a faint reflection of humanity in the horse's eye and figure.
The exhibit starts off with detailed anatomical studies of horses -- in his time, Stubbs was hailed as the new Da Vinci for his pairing of precise scientific detail and art. Following the Renaissance master's example, Stubbs dissected horse after horse to perfect the accuracy of his paintings. At one point in his life, he holed himself up in a farmhouse to slice through horseflesh and hang horse cadavers from the ceiling.
His obsession resulted in an enormous book, "The Anatomy of the Horse," which is on display in the gallery. Stubbs' anatomical sketches contrast meticulous scientific effort with startlingly haunting effects. Gray skeletons gallop toward you, bodies dead but eyes alive, phantoms of the ancient horse. You can admire Stubbs' scientific rigor while feeling shivers go down your spine.
The exhibit continues with a series of paintings commissioned by several English nobles whose lives revolved around raising and racing thoroughbreds. The commissioned paintings are more conventional, with a civilized and genteel tone. Rolling hills, sunrises and majestic clouds glimmer in the background. Peeved jockeys, admiring ladies and grumpy gentlemen punctuate the paintings, but the focus is always on the horse.
One standout commissioned painting is of a pair of jet-black horses. The horses, standing straight and tall, are juxtaposed with two chubby, clumsy servants. The noble wildness of the horses is imprisoned by harnesses and blinders. This painting was commissioned by none other than King George IV.
The tender nature of Stubbs' horse fascination is clearest in the paintings that deviate from the horse-sunshine-pasture formula. One example of such a painting is Whistlejacket, Stubbs' most famous painting. Whistlejacket depicts a horse rearing midair. There is nothing to distract the eye from the horse, no scenery or humans. There is just a background of simple gray. You cannot feel the painter's presence, as you could in the more formal, stilted paintings.
The painting is more like a candid photograph, capturing the essence of the horse's beauty and energy in a split-second shot. The horse is sensuous with its chestnut gleam and rounded, muscular form. Whistlejacket's eye does not meet the viewer's; instead, it seems to look inward, contemplating.
There are other paintings like Whistlejacket that have a trace of humanlike spirit in the horse. One such painting is a large panorama of mares, foals and stallions. Once again, there is nothing to distract your attention from the horses. Foals suckle for their mothers' milk and stallions guard the mares and foals. The shared contentment is palpable and alive in this glimpse of horse family life.
Not all of Stubbs' horses reflect positive human traits. Stubbs did a series of paintings and prints of lions attacking horses. The series reveals something primordial lurking under the horse's serene and refined surface. In it Stubbs is pursuing a dark, primeval wildness that lies deep within all animals, horses and humans alike. Be prepared for an instant of instinctual kinship when you look into the eye of a horse being attacked by a voracious lion.
No longer is the horse in a sunny field or against a backdrop of gray. Instead, an inhospitable, ominous wind blows through his mane and into his eyes. He walks in front of the mouth of a cave when, suddenly, a lion lunges out at him. The lion roars as he sinks his teeth deep into the horse's sinuous shoulder. The horse's lip curls back as he screams in fear, and his eyes bulge out in terror. His entire body is a mass of tense, horror-fueled muscle. Taken aback by the intensity of the primal struggle of life and death, you want to turn away, but can't. There is something too shudderingly familiar about the picture.
Beneath the refined and civilized exteriors that horses and humans share, there is something deep and dark. Go rediscover your primordial roots with Stubbs' horses.
"Stubbs and the Horse" is on display at the Walters Arts Gallery, which is located at 600 N. Charles St. in Mt. Vernon, from March 13 to May 29.
