George Stubbs ARA 1724–1806
NG 6569 
Whistlejacket

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

? 1762

Oil on canvas, 292 × 246.4 cm (115 × 97 in.)

Provenance

Commissioned by Charles Watson Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham ( d.s.p. 1782); his nephew and principal heir, William Wentworth‐Fitzwilliam, 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam, then by descent to the 10th Earl Fitzwilliam (d. 1979); Trustees of the Rt. Hon. Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels Settlement, from whom purchased with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and private donations by the National Gallery 1997.

Exhibited

On long loan to Kenwood House, London, 1971–81 , and the centrepiece of a small exhibition there in 1971 (no cat.); Tate Gallery, 1984–5 (34); on loan to the National Gallery from April 1996 until its purchase by the Gallery in 1997 .

Literature

Horace Walpole, MS journal, 1772, published in ed. Paget Toynbee, ‘Horace Walpole’s Journals of Visits to Country Seats’, Walpole Society, XVI, 1928, p. 71; Ozias Humphry, ‘Particulars of the Life of Mr Stubbs… given to the author … by himself and committed from his own relation’, MS compiled c. 1790–7, Picton Collection, Liverpool City Libraries; Waagen 1854, III, p. 339; Christopher Hussey, ‘Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire’, English Country Houses: Early Georgian 1715–1760, London 1955, p. 154 and fig. 252; H.F. Constantine, ‘Lord Rockingham and Stubbs; Some New Documents’, Burlington Magazine, XCV, 1953, pp. 236–8; Parker 1971, pp.56, 65; Taylor 1971, pp. 29, 205–6; Egerton 1984, cat. no. 34, p. 60.

Engraved

Etching and stipple, in reverse direction, image 8.6 × 10.2cm, with etched inscription across lower corners GS RA (left) and BK (right); a sketchy view of Wentworth Woodhouse and some rocky cliffs added as background. This etching (of which only one impression is known) is assumed to have been made by Benjamin Killingbeck while working for the Marquess of Rockingham c. 1781 (repr. Christopher Lennox‐Boyd, Rob Dixon and Tim Clayton, George Stubbs: The Complete Engraved Works, London 1989, p. 175, no. 61).

Technical Notes

In very good condition. The picture was lined, cleaned and restored a few years before its acquisition. The canvas support has a vertical seam 64 cm from the left edge. There are numerous small splashes of original grey/brown paint scattered over the background.

Discussion

Stubbs arrived in London in or around 1758, bringing with him a portfolio of drawings made during eighteen months’ dissection and intensive study of the anatomy of the horse (see Biography). His arduous anatomical research was undertaken primarily because, as a painter of horses, he wanted fully to understand what lay beneath the skin, how the bone structure governed movement and how the relationship of muscle to bone shaped bodily contours. He emphasised that his dissections were limited to ‘as much as I thought necessary for the study of Painting’; he did not explore ‘the internal parts of a Horse’.¹

To those who were interested in breeding and racing horses – and for many noblemen and gentlemen, this was their chief interest – the truth to nature displayed in Stubbs’s anatomical drawings was a revelation, dramatically exposing the horse paintings of such hitherto popular artists as John Wootton (1682–1764) and James Seymour ( c. 1702–52) as deficient in fundamental knowledge. Stubbs quickly attracted the attention of a circle of aristocratic patrons, with the 3rd Duke of Richmond taking the lead in commissioning the three large canvases still at Goodwood House,² and the Dukes of Ancaster, Grafton and Portland, the Viscounts Torrington and Bolingbroke and Lord Grosvenor offering numerous commissions.³ He painted their racehorses and jockeys, their stallions and grooms and their dogs. In particular, he painted the brood mares and foals of their stud farms, in a sequence of at least ten variations, chiefly painted during the 1760s. To the general eye, Stubbs’s paintings of mares and foals offer a lyrical glimpse of the English countryside, enhanced by the most graceful and least menacing of its creatures. But those who commissioned such paintings wanted (and got, from Stubbs) accurate portraiture of their own animals. Much thought and considerable expense would have gone in to selecting a stallion to cover a mare, and among the foals, future racing winners and good breeders would be looked for. For the moment, however, the mares and foals are seen as if in a state of nature, free from the bridles, saddles and spurs of the racecourse.

Charles Watson‐Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham (1730–82), was to commission twelve works from Stubbs, almost as many as Stubbs’s most constant patron, the 1st Earl Grosvenor. For both men, Stubbs produced some of his finest work (for the Grosvenor Hunt and Lord Grosvenor’s Mares and Foals must surely be counted among the finest).⁴ But for Rockingham – and largely as a direct result of Rockingham’s particular aesthetic sensibilities – Stubbs produced certain works which transcend all previously accepted traditions of horse painting by dispensing with backgrounds, allowing the subject alone to command attention. The finest of these are Whistlejacket and Mares and Foals without a background (fig. 1). No correspondence between the patron and the painter has survived to indicate how such a decision was reached, but given the fact that Lord Rockingham had formed the larger part of his collection of classical sculpture before commissioning work from Stubbs, it is likely to have been chiefly his decision to let the noblest of Stubbs’s paintings of his horses stand out, almost like bronzes, against plain backgrounds.

It is the privilege of the art historian largely to ignore the public life of a patron (or to relegate it to an endnote⁵), unless it affects the work he commissioned. Here the only facts relating to Lord Rockingham’s political career which need be mentioned are that by 1761 he had become (with some reluctance for the role) leader of the Whig opposition to George III’s favourite, Lord Bute, that he formed a short‐lived ministry in 1765, and that he became Prime Minister again in 1782, the year of his death. He sat at least three times to Reynolds.⁶ For Rockingham himself, being in the public eye meant that he had less time to indulge his two private, seemingly disparate passions, collecting sculpture and breeding racehorses.

Rockingham was one of the richest men in England, having inherited (in 1750) vast properties in Ireland, Northamptonshire and Yorkshire, including coal mines and quarries. His principal seat was Wentworth House, Yorkshire (now known as Wentworth Woodhouse); rebuilt by his father on a huge scale,⁷ it offered vast scope for the display of sculpture, its Great Hall in particular having been designed for [page 243]statues in niches.⁸ In Italy in 1748–50, on the Grand Tour, Rockingham (then still bearing the junior title of Lord Malton) commissioned for the Great Hall eight six‐foot‐high marble copies of the Farnese Callipygian Venus, the Capitoline Flora, Germanicus and Antinous, the Dancing Faun in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, the Queen of Sweden’s Faun and the Medici Venus and Apollino.⁹ His most important purchase (from the sculptor) was Foggini’s marble group Samson and the Philistines (now coll. V&A ). He also began the collection of medals and small bronzes which were to be shown both at Wentworth and in his London house in Grosvenor Square. The bronzes bought in Italy included ‘a horse’ and ‘a running horse’ by Giambologna.¹⁰ There was ample room at Wentworth House for large paintings as well as for a sculpture collection. In 1749, while Rockingham was in Florence, his father had asked him to look for two large pictures for the dining room; he reported that he had seen two large hunting pictures which might do, but they were £100 each, ‘above my venturing at’.¹¹

Rockingham loved sport, particularly racing. Whenever cares of state permitted, he went to Newmarket, where he kept a string of racehorses, and gambled heavily. In this he shared a passion common to his class; Horace Walpole observed that ‘half the nobility and half the money of England’ went to Newmarket.¹² Rockingham’s wife resignedly hoped that he would restrict his gambling to ‘just upon the turf, for there is always a possibility of some sort of pleasure in that; but not the smallest in other sorts’.¹³ He took equal pleasure in racing at York, where his donation of a grandstand in 1755 transformed the former fairly disorderly meetings on the Knavesmire into an orderly spectator sport. At Wentworth he bred thoroughbred horses, his stud farm there including some two hundred horses. The letters he received from Joshua Cobb, his head groom, must have been a welcome relief from his despatch‐boxes, and he preserved several of them, including one dated 9 April 1769 which reads: ‘My Lord, Cloudy foal’d Wednesday morning the 8 day of April and as got a Colt foal a bay small star and the near hind leg white – She foaled about three of the clock in the morning…’¹⁴

Rockingham was quick to recognise that Stubbs was the ideal painter to do justice to his horses. Evidently he invited Stubbs to spend some months in the first half of 1762 at Wentworth. The first five works he commissioned from the artist are entered in his account book under the heading 1762 as follows: Aug. 15th – to Mr Stubbs Horse Painter, a picture of Brood Mares – Stallions – Hounds – and Scrub and [illegible] – £194.5.’ Stubbs’s receipt for this payment gives fuller details:¹⁵ August Y^e 15^th 1762 Rec^d of the Most Hon^ble ye Marquis of Rockingham, the sum of one Hundred and ninty four pounds five shillings in full for a picture of five brood‐Mares and two foles one picture of three Stallions and one figure and one picture of a figure on Horseback and a picture of five Dogs and another of one Dog with one Single Horse.These documents establish that the first works Stubbs painted for Rockingham were those now known as Mares and Foals without a background (fig. 1), Joshua (or Simon) Cobb with Whistlejacket and two other Stallions (fig. 2),¹⁶ Scrub with John Singleton up,¹⁷ Foxhounds in a Landscape and a now untraced painting of a single horse with a dog. Rockingham is likely to have admired Stubbs’s exact and elegant depiction of a group of his mares and foals so much that he asked Stubbs to leave them as they were, like a classical frieze, without [page 244]adding a background. Foxhounds in a Landscape (fig. 3) perhaps suggests the sort of Yorkshire background which Stubbs might have added. Joshua (or Simon) Cobb with Whistlejacket and two other Stallions was also left without a background. In these decisions, Rockingham’s feeling for the supremacy of sculpted forms without scenery is likely to have been uppermost. As a breeder of horses, he also valued exact portraiture of specific animals, their conformation and their individual characteristics (down to the ‘small star’ and the markings of a hind leg, such as his head groom had reported of a newborn colt). Earlier artists had painted ‘horses’. No artist before Stubbs had combined powers of general anatomical knowledge with specific observation of particular animals.

Whistlejacket’s beauty as represented in the painting reproduced here as fig. 2 must have inspired Rockingham to commission the larger portrait in which Whistlejacket is the sole, monumental figure. Art historians have generally shuddered at attempts to relate the word ‘beauty’ to the word ‘horse’ (especially after Ellis Waterhouse opined that admiration for lesser horse painters merely confused ‘the history of art with praising famous horses’¹⁸); but the Marquess of Rockingham and George Stubbs prove them to be blinkered. Rockingham asked Stubbs to paint Whistlejacket on a canvas nearly twelve feet high not because he was a ‘famous horse’ but because he was a supremely beautiful specimen of the pure‐bred Arabian horse at its finest.

Whistlejacket, foaled in 1749, was bred at Sir William Middleton’s stud farm at Belsay Castle, Northumberland. The finest Arabian blood available in England flowed through his veins. His sire was Mogul, a son of the Godolphin Arabian, one of the three Arabian stallions imported into England which provided the male line for the development of the thoroughbred horse through some thirty generations to the present day.¹⁹ Whistlejacket’s (unnamed) dam was also highbred, for she was a daughter of the Hampton Court Chestnut Arabian, from the stud founded by Cromwell and enriched by Charles II’s imports of Arabian horses.²⁰ Paintings (however conjectural) of famous sires were of particular interest to breeders of thoroughbreds, and formed one of the specialities of John Wootton. Versions of Wootton’s The Bloody‐Shouldered Arabian and The Hampton Court Arabian, perhaps acquired by Rockingham’s father, were already at Wentworth;²¹ with their angular shoulders, spindly legs, spade‐shaped heads and bulging eyes, they are likely immediately to have looked out of date when Stubbs’s work was hung.

Whistlejacket’s career as a racehorse was only moderately successful. Between 1753 and 1755, he won various races and matches in the North of England (Stockton, Morpeth, Newcastle, York, Lincoln, etc.), but on his first appearance at Newmarket in 1756, lost two of his three races; whereupon Sir William Middleton sold him to Lord Rockingham. Whistlejacket’s most celebrated victory was at York races in August 1759, in a match for 2000 guineas against Mr Turner’s Brutus. Whistlejacket, ridden by Rockingham’s favourite jockey John Singleton,²² won by a length in a finish so exciting that the Public Advertiser's reporter called it the finest match ever seen (hardly a rare phrase in racing news). Whistlejacket was by then ten years old. He did not race again. Instead, Rockingham retired him to stud at Wentworth, where Horace Walpole (visiting Wentworth Park in 1766) could have observed him but probably did not; disappointed in the landscaping of the park, Walpole commented sourly: ‘This lord loves nothing but horses, and the enclosures for them take place of everything.’²³ Whistlejacket was averagely [page 245]successful at stud;²⁴ presumably he died there some time before Lord Rockingham’s death in 1782 and the ensuing sale of the stud, in which his name is not listed. Compared with racehorses and stallions such as Eclipse, Gimcrack or Mambrino (all ‘sitters’ to Stubbs), Whistlejacket has small claim to fame, and is not even mentioned in the annals of northern racing history.²⁵ Without Stubbs, his name might have been remembered only as a passing echo in Goldsmith’s line (in She Stoops to Conquer) about plans for an elopement: ‘I have got you a pair of horses that will fly like Whistlejacket.’²⁶

White hope of the Whigs though he continued to be, racegoer and gambler at Newmarket though he occasionally was, the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham was eminently capable of recognising beauty when he saw it. He would have been fully aware that in Whistlejacket he owned a creature which exemplified the finest characteristics of the Arabian breed. In colour, Whistlejacket was a rich coppery chestnut, his tail and mane lightening to white, reputedly the colouring of the original wild horses of Arabia. His head was small and tapering, very broad in the forehead, the ears delicately modelled in an exquisite curve; his nostrils very large and wide, thin‐edged and mobile; his profile concave, like a gazelle’s, with the head joining the neck in a beautifully arched curve. The arch of the neck swells in stallions into a crest of potency, as Whistlejacket’s clearly does. The shoulders are long and sloping, the chest broad and deep, the back short and level, the legs ‘hard as iron, the back tendons like steel bars’. If this reads like a purple passage, it should be stated that it is drawn from the standard definition of the ideal characteristics of the Arabian horse,²⁷ which are displayed by Whistlejacket to perfection.

Rockingham also knew when to let a good thing alone. That Whistlejacket remains as Stubbs painted him must primarily have been the Marquess’s decision. Contemporaries were so astonished that a single horse should command a huge canvas that legends quickly developed that the Marquess’s original intention was that Whistlejacket should be simply the subordinate steed in a picture originally conceived as an equestrian portrait of George III. Such a belief was noted by Horace Walpole, as he passed through Wentworth Woodhouse on his Yorkshire tour of August 1772. He noted ‘Many pictures of horses by Stubbs, well done. One large as life, fine, no ground done; it was to have had a figure of George 3^d until Lord Rockingham went into opposition’.²⁸ Walpole was visiting the house, not the Marquess, and is likely to have been shown round it by the housekeeper, who may not have been as well‐informed as Mrs Garnett, housekeeper at Kedleston between 1766 and 1809.²⁹ Ozias Humphry’s MS Memoir repeats the story; but nothing else confirms it. The small etching already noted (? made by Benjamin Killingbeck while he was working for Rockingham in about 1781) adds a sketchy view of Wentworth House in the background; it does not presume to add a rider.

Large equestrian portraits in a heroic tradition had of course been regularly commissioned over the centuries, from sculptors (as in the Colleoni Monument³⁰) as well as painters. Rubens had portrayed the Cardinal‐Infante Ferdinand on a heavy horse.³¹ More fulsomely, Charles II had been portrayed on Pegasus, no less.³² Velázquez had portrayed Philip IV of Spain and his son Prince Balthasar Carlos mounted on great horses, and kept an oil sketch of a horse in his studio, ready to be ‘mounted’ by whichever personage might aspire to such elevation.³³ But by the 1760s the convention was largely outworn, and by 1800, when David used it for his portrait of Napoleon crossing the Alps,³⁴ faintly absurd. That the Marquess of Rockingham should seek to ingratiate himself with George III by commissioning his portrait astride Whistlejacket seems completely out of character; even more out of character is the notion that if he conceived such an idea, he was then mean‐spirited enough to cancel it out of pique because he was (temporarily) out of office. The notion that Whistlejacket was designed to bear a rider is likely to have arisen only in the minds of those to whom the idea of a horse as sole hero of a huge canvas was unprecedented.

Some idea of what Stubbs’s picture might have looked like if a rider had been added is offered by Reynolds’s equestrian portrait of Lord Ligonier (fig. 4). In this, the horse may in fact have been painted for Reynolds by Stubbs.³⁵ Humphry records that Stubbs’s first commission in London was to paint a ‘warhorse’ for Reynolds; and certainly Lord Ligonier’s horse is beyond Reynolds’s own capabilities. The essential aspect of the horse in equestrian portraits of heroic figures – monarchs, military commanders, or anyone else depicted for propaganda purposes – was that the horse should be seen to be a magnificent yet wholly subordinate animal, as submissive to the rider’s reins as (by inference) were the subjects of a kingdom to a monarch’s rule, or the soldiers of an army to their commander’s orders. In such equestrian portraits, the horse is often depicted in a rearing position, akin to that of the levade of haute école; but it invariably faces straight ahead, controlled by a fierce bit which would break its jaw if it dared to disobey.³⁶

Whistlejacket, by contrast, is portrayed as a free spirit. Apart from the fact that he is shod, he is depicted as if in a state of nature. No bridle, saddle or reins curtail his freedom; he could be a stallion prancing at liberty, his mane untrimmed, his tail undocked. Even Dr Waagen, who in general forebore forbore to comment on paintings of horses, was impressed by Whistlejacket; visiting Wentworth in the early 1850s, he noted ‘A brown horse, size of life; of great animation’.³⁷ His head is turned towards the painter, as if startled, or resentful of the painter’s intrusion on his privacy. Humphry’s Memoir includes anecdotes about Whistlejacket’s nervousness, his intractability, his need to be soothed by a groom before ‘sitting’ to the painter; but these are a townee’s imaginings of the horse painter’s difficulties.

The Wentworth Woodhouse archives, though unusually comprehensive, contain no clear reference to the commission to paint Whistlejacket. The receipt from Stubbs dated 30 December 1762 (quoted above) records ‘Eighty guineas for one Picture of a Lion and another of a Horse Large as Life’; the second item has been assumed to refer to Whistlejacket,³⁸ but the conjunction of those two pictures probably refers to the pair of large pictures now known as Lion attacking a Horse and Lion attacking a Stag painted for Lord Rockingham’s London house.³⁹ Possibly the commission for the life‐size Whistlejacket, likely to have been given in or about 1762, was also given and paid for in London, its documentation not preserved among the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments.

The next recorded payments by Rockingham to Stubbs are on 31 August 1764, when Stubbs received £70.15.0. for two pictures (now known as Sampson in Three Positions and The Marquess of Rockingham’s Arabian Stallion led by a Groom at Creswell Crags).⁴⁰ In 1766 Rockingham commissioned Stubbs to paint his victorious racehorse Bay Malton with John Singleton (a fairly conventional profile portrait). Stubbs also painted two later racehorse portraits for him, in which another artist (? Benjamin Killingbeck) appears to have completed the backgrounds.⁴¹

Some time after Rockingham’s death (in 1782), a ‘Whistlejacket Room’ was created at Wentworth House.⁴² There, set in to the white plasterwork of a room 40‐foot square, Whistlejacket enjoyed the luxury of space. Only two family portraits kept him company: Reynolds’s portrait of the 2nd Marquess as a child, and Lawrence’s portrait of his eventual heir, the 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam.

Notes

An exceptionally large and well‐preserved collection of papers relating to the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham and to Wentworth Woodhouse has survived and, fully calendared, is in the care of Sheffield Archives. References below to Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments are to papers in this collection.