The Anatomy of a Horse

GEORGE STUBBS (1724-1806) was one of the most

original artists Britain has produced. Such is the present reputation of his paintings, with their astonishingly convincing portraits of both animals and people, that it is easy to forget how much his success was based on rigorous scientific observation.

In 1756 he rented an out-of-the-way farmhouse in northern Lincolnshire where he erected a special scaffold to hold the cadavers of horses as he dissected and drew. (It is said that he had a particularly strong stomach when it came to smells.) After eighteen months of single-minded dedication Stubbs produced the drawings for The Anatomy of the Horse, which he later etched himself. The result was a sensation. Letters of congratulation came from scientists from all over Europe, amazed not only at the perfection of the finished work, but that it had been produced privately, without any patronage. The Anatomy remained a textbook for artists and scientists for well over a century, and to this day the strange, spare beauty of these prints continues to fascinate.

This edition reproduces all Stubbs’ etchings and is taken from the 1853 printing, the last to use Stubbs’ original plates. The full text of Stubbs’ commentary is included for the veterinarially minded. Essays by Constance-Anne Parker and Oliver Kase place Stubbs’ work in the context of his life and times, and of 18th-century medical and veterinary science.

Constance-Anne Parker (1921–2016), a distinguished sculptor and painter, was the Librarian and Archivist of the Royal Academy, where she also lectured. She was the author of Mr. Stubbs the Horse Painter (1971), and George Stubbs: Art, Animals & Anatomy (1984) Oliver Kase is Director of Collections at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, and oversees the Max Beckmann Archive. In 2011–12 he was assistant curator for The Art of Enlightenment, a major international exhibition organised between Germany and China. He lectures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, and is the author of numerous publications on the art of the 18th to 21st centuries

THE

ANATOMY OF THE

HORSE

James Bretherton after Thomas Orde, 1st Baron Bolton, George Stubbs: A Sketch, undated, c. 1773-75

PA L L A S

AT H E N E

INTRODUCTION BY

CONSTANCE-ANNE PARKER

I

t seems as though Stubbs always had to have a project on hand. Some subject that was quite outside, though related to, the work that he was doing as a successful painter. A project to work at, to inquire into and to experiment with. He seemed compelled to have a scientific investigation as an occupation for the restless energy of his mind. As a child he was absorbed by the mystery of unknown natural forms, and as a youth he explored the world of living structure.

By 1745, at the age of 21 and living in York, where he was earning a living as a portrait painter, Stubbs was already giving lectures on anatomy to pupils at the local infirmary. One of his contacts prevailed on him to illustrate a new book on midwifery in 1751, and for this it seems Stubbs taught himself the rudiments of etching and engraving. He was not satisfied by following the methods taught him, but immediately experimented to improve all the technical processes. A brief visit to Rome only encouraged him to turn to nature, rather than to art, for his inspiration; and some time in 1756 or 1757 he started to make his preparations for a really tremendous project, that of producing a book on the anatomy of the horse.

This was to take him the better part of ten years to finish, and was the result of many more years of study and observation. It was ‘upon the advice of his young Chirugical friends with whom he had been previously connected at York’ that he decided to ‘complete and publish The Anatomy of the Horse’. This last quotation from Humphry gives the impression that the project had been in Stubbs’ mind for a number of years, and that he had done a good deal of preliminary work on the subject with the book in mind. In the preface to the book, he says that he consulted most of the treatises upon the subject, and when the book was advertised it said that it was the result of many years of actual dissection. Of the treatises upon the horse, the most important, anatomically speaking, was Carlo Ruini’s Dell’ Anatomia et dell’ Infirmita del Cavallo. This was published as early as 1598 and little that was published subsequently improved upon it, either illustratively or

scientifically. Petrus Camper, the distinguished anatomist, wrote of the illustrations: ‘They convey a general idea of the anatomy of the parts; but they cannot serve the painter. What then is to be expected from the works of Sannier and Snape, and others which are merely bad copies from the imperfect engravings of Ruini!’ There was not much inspiration to be gained from these later works. Stubbs’s own creative observation produced a completely fresh approach to the subject. The horse appears to be a living animal instead of a dead and stylized figure.

To complete the final studies for this immense work Stubbs needed a period of peace and quiet, far away in the depth of the country, where he could dissect without offending anyone. He went to Lincolnshire, to the small village of Horkstow, about six miles from Barton, where he had stayed when he was working for the Nelthorpes. There he ‘engaged a farmhouse that he might without inconvenience to others have dead horses, and subjects adapted to his purpose’.

The exact location of this farmhouse is not certain, but presumably it would have been some distance from the village and isolated from neighbours. The ‘inconvenience’ would have been considerable had other farms been within receiving distance of the nauseating and penetrating smell of decaying horseflesh.

Landseer said of the lion which the Zoo had provided for him to use as a model for his bronze lions in Trafalgar Square, and which had died whilst he was out of town: ‘Anything as fearful as the gases from the royal remains it is difficult to conceive . . . We shut our eyes to nasty inconvenience and open them to the importance of the opportunity of handling the dangerous subject whilst in a state of safety.’

Stubbs must often have ‘shut his eyes to nasty inconvenience’ during the next year and a half. He tackled the whole project by himself, with no outside help, and with no other companion or assistant than Mary Spencer, his common-law wife. It must have been rather hard on her, for unlike him she had not been brought up in the house of a tanner, and her nose was probably less accustomed to unpleasant odours.

V

The medical students and surgeons from York failed to come to Stubbs’s assistance with either money or practical help, as they had originally promised. So, single-handed, he began what to most men would be a life-work, and one requiring a good deal of careful organization. There were three main operations to be conducted. First, after the awkward and heavy job of rigging up the dead horse in the dissecting-roomstudio, there was the dirty work of stripping and cleaning, and the injection of the animal’s veins, preparatory to beginning the dissection proper. Second, having dissected and laid bare the part to be illustrated, there was the completely different task of making working drawings, which was clean, precise work, far away from the butcher’s shop atmosphere of bleeding the horse to death, and then skinning and disembowelling it. Finally, there was the writing up of the descriptions for the book’s text.

Humphry gives this detailed account of the way Stubbs attacked the project: As these studies and operations were singular and very important, the manner in which they were conducted may not be uninteresting to relate. The first subject which was prepared was a horse which was bled to death by the jugular vein, — after which the arteries and veins were injected. Then a bar of iron was suspended from the ceiling of the room, by a Teagle of Iron to which Iron Hooks were fixed. — Under this bar a plank was swung about eighteen inches wide, for the Horse’s feet to rest upon, and the Horse was suspended to the Bar of Iron by the above mentioned Hooks which were fastened into the opposite side of the Horse to that which was intended to be designed; by passing the Hooks through the ribs and fastening them under the Backbone and by these means the Horse was fixed in the attitude which these prints represent and continued hanging in this posture six or seven weeks, or as long as they were fit for use.

His drawings of a skeleton were previously made — and then the operations upon this fix’d subject were thus begun. He first began by dissecting and designing the muscles of the abdomen — proceeding through five different layers of muscles till he came to the peritoneum and the pleura through which appeared the lungs and the Intestines — after which the Bowels were taken out and Cast away — Then he proceeded to dissect the Head, by first stripping off the Skin and after having cleaned and prepared the muscles &c. for the drawing, he made careful designs of VI

them and with the explanation which usually employed him a whole day. Then he took off another layer of Muscles, which he prepared, designed and described, in the same manner as in the Book — and so he proceeded till he came to the Skeleton — It must be noted that by means of the Injections the muscles, the Blood-vessels and the Nerves retained their form to the last without undergoing any change of position — In this manner he advanced his work by stripping off the skin and cleaning and preparing as much of the subject as he concluded would employ a whole day to prepare design and describe, as above related till the whole subject was completed.

The drawings for The Anatomy of the Horse, or at any rate, some of the drawings made at Horkstow, can be seen and studied in the Royal Academy Library. If looked at very closely, it is possible to see beneath the drawing of the muscles a faint trace of the skeleton, drawn in pale ink. Also the outline or silhouette of the horse was generally laid in, in the same manner.

Stubbs prepared a master drawing of the silhouette of the horse in the required pose, and the skeleton in the same position. These would have been traced on to a number of sheets of paper, the master drawing having been pricked all along the outline with tiny holes and placed over a blank sheet of paper, after which powdered charcoal or chalk would have been tapped, or pounced, through the holes on to the blank sheet, leaving a series of faintly dusted-in dots. These little dots were then carefully joined up to reform the exact outline of the master drawing. It is fairly easy to see these joined dots on one or two of the drawings, as it gives a slightly jerky look to the line. He also squared up some of the drawings and reproduced them by this method.

These tracings were executed in pale ink leaving a permanent, but unobtrusive drawing, as a basis on which to place the muscular layers as the dissections progressed deeper and deeper – thus giving a continuity of size and pose over a number of different horses; Stubbs said that he ‘dissected a great number of horses’.

One must bear in mind that many of these drawings were working studies through which Stubbs was gaining the knowledge and information needed to produce the final set of finished drawings from which the plates were to be engraved. Quite a number of these drawings are almost notes, rather than finished studies; they are rapidly and roughly scribbled in, in black chalk, and bear little visual resemblance to the plates.

It is interesting to note that while the side-view studies

MAKE THE KNIFE GO WITH THE PENCIL BY

OLIVER KASE Children in the eighteenth century played with wooden dolls or hobbyhorses; George Stubbs played with bones.

Ozias Humphry recalled in his Memoir that Stubbs, as a child in Liverpool of barely eight years old, was given bones and preserved specimens by a neighbouring doctor so that he could undertake his own small-scale anatomical research. On his deathbed, Stubbs, by then eighty-one, regretted not being able to complete his work The Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl.2 As a theme, the study of anatomy repeated itself with such consistency and frequency in Stubbs’s artistic life that we might still ask today ‘whether most to admire the artist as a dissector, or as a painter of animals’ as the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1806 did.3 The quandary is no different when we are faced with his most famous anatomical project: The Anatomy of the Horse. The idea of publishing an atlas of equine anatomy probably took seed in the circle of Stubbs’s surgical colleagues at the York County Hospital, where he was performing anatomical dissections and giving lectures by the time he was twenty.4 It was not, however, until 1756 that Stubbs took up the project in earnest, having returned from a short sojourn in Italy. Humphry relates that Stubbs, largely alone but also with the occasional assistance of his common-law wife Mary Spencer, spent eighteen months dissecting, drawing and describing horses in a farmhouse or barn in Horkstow in Lincolnshire.5 The eighteen highly polished drawings made by him there on the basis of twenty-four (still surviving) working sketches after dissecting approximately a dozen horses are timeless masterpieces of animal anatomy. They show the horse as a skeleton first, in lateral, anterior, and posterior views and, then, the horse’s musculature from the same three perspectives. Stubbs lays the horse bare in no fewer than five steps. Beginning with the subcutaneous tissue, Stubbs drills down into the deepest muscle layers, illustrating the position and paths of the ligaments on the skeleton as well as the deep blood vessels and nerves. These drawings still impress today in terms of their artistic just as much as their scientific achievement. Their exceptional elegance, clarity, and graphic precision contrast hugely with the reality of the bloody, dirty and physically draining work that XII

Stubbs must have carried out amid the stink of rotting cadavers and in constant fear of infection. In his search for qualified engravers who would be able to transpose the project into print, Stubbs brought the drawings to London in 1758, where they quickly became known on account of their outstanding quality.6 The story goes that even the most established engravers and printers, for example Arthur Pond and Charles Grignion, turned down the task of rendering the accomplished drawings for the press.7 Stubbs subsequently spent six years etching the printing plates himself, working in the early mornings and at night, until they finally appeared in 1766 as an anatomical atlas— supplemented by comprehensive descriptive texts from his own hand. So accomplished were the etchings that we can speak of his ingenious translation of the drawings into prints. The anatomist Peter Camper recognized the achievement in a letter to Stubbs in 1772 thus: ‘I’m amazed to meet in the same person so great an Anatomist, so accurate a Painter & so excellent an Engraver.’8 The path taken by Stubbs’s career is unusual in that before making the drawings for his Anatomy of the Horse he was neither an established nor experienced painter of horses but rather had been trying his hand as a portrait painter.9 His earliest known sketches for paintings of horses date to about 1759. Stubbs’s anatomical studies thus not only enriched and improved his work as a painter and portrayer of horses, but actually gave it its impulse. The fact that Stubbs received a whole series of commissions for prestigious equine portraits and hunting scenes from 1760⁄61 onwards and was rapidly elevated to the leading painter of horses to the English nobility can only be explained by the early success of his anatomical drawings. Two aspects are worthy of note here: in terms of his artistic practice Stubbs’s approach testifies to an uncompromising ‘critical’ (in the Enlightenment sense of the term) approach, in which painting is conceived of as a science and its subjects are examined through their reduction to their fundamental principles. Yet the reasons for which Stubbs’s studies were successful still require explanation, for it was thanks to these studies that Stubbs was able to establish himself primarily as a horse painter, rather than as an anatomical draughtsman. The question of how anatomical knowledge was

translated into painting, a process which in itself is hardly self-evident, apparently did not pose itself for his patrons. To his contemporaries, Stubbs’s æsthetic anatomical drawings must have appeared as the promising beginnings of a new, scientifically founded, horse painting. At the same time, the situation was favourable for Stubbs: the leading painters of the older generation in this field, such as James Seymour (1702-1752), were already dead, or, like John Wootton (c. 1682-1764), well advanced in years. Stubbs’s drawings, moreover, were well-matched with an interest recently pursued by his potential clients: their systematic attempts in the area of horse-breeding chimed perfectly with Stubbs’s analytical investigation of the body of the horse.

ANATOMY AND ITS MEANING IN NATURAL HISTORY AND VETERINARY MEDECINE Stubbs’s lifelong enthusiasm for anatomy was more than just an individual interest; it was also the expression of the popularization of anatomy as a discipline in the eighteenth century. The prime goal of the Enlightenment era, the striving to survey and systematize human knowledge in its entirety, meant that public attention was focused above all on natural history. As an overarching discipline, natural history comprised zoology, biology and geology in equal measure. Anatomical description and illustration attained central importance, not least in the recording of the myriad new species of animals then being discovered on Enlightenment research voyages, because anatomical description and illustration authoritatively advocated an understanding of the ways in which animals moved as well as their physique.10 As a consequence, standardized lateral views of animal skeletons, anatomical plates and meticulous anatomical descriptions also became a constituent part of one of the most successful and comprehensive publishing projects of the eighteenth century: GeorgesLouis Leclerc de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, which appeared in forty-four volumes between 1749 and 1804. Buffon, the powerful director of the Jardin du Roi in Paris, gave the horse dignity by according it particular attention, putting it before all other animals, and describing its nobility, temperament and obedient nature. The anthropocentric criteria backed by the author in his way of looking at Nature saw in the horse the animal most akin to man, the most useful and, above all, the most beautiful of all creatures.11 It was not only in natural historical publications that the horse enjoyed admiration and attention. Of outstanding economic importance as a working animal in agriculture, and as means of transport and conveyance in both civil and military life, the horse and its care, sustenance and

breeding were of great strategic relevance. With the aim of applying the newest scientific standards to these tasks, the first veterinary schools in the world were founded in France in the 1760s. Scholarship to date has overlooked that Stubbs expressly mentioned the French institutes in the foreword to his Anatomy of the Horse and showed himself to be well informed about the recent developments in continental Europe.12 Only five years before the publication of the Anatomy, the first state school for veterinary medicine had been founded in Lyon in 1761 by Claude Bourgelat (1712‒1779).13 Also under his aegis the Ecole royale vétérinaire d’Alfort commenced operating in 1766 not far from Paris. Bourgelat’s students subsequently founded numerous similar establishments across Europe. In England, which lagged far behind France in veterinary medicine, such a school first came about through the endeavours of the exiled Frenchman Charles Vial de Saint-Bel, founder of the Royal Veterinary College in London in 1791. Both the establishment of veterinary schools and Stubbs’s Anatomy of the Horse aspired to a science of animal anatomy. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, medical expertise in terms of horses took the form of knowledge gained on the job by farriers, equerries, and horse doctors, knowledge which had been handed down by word of mouth or written down in compendiums of earlier publications. Bourgelat sought to replace these traditions by critically overhauling texts and examining animals empirically, whilst being guided by unshakeable principles and exacting methods.14 For Bourgelat, anatomy was the most important element in the refounding animal medicine,15 an element which he had to promote energetically nonetheless. Complexity and disgust were the two fundamental problems of anatomy that Bourgelat faced. Difficulties experienced by beginners in clearly differentiating between and recognising the individual anatomical parts were compounded by the fact that dissection was a dissuasively dirty business.16 ‘THE ANATOMY OF THE HORSE’ IN THE CONTEXT OF ‘POLITE SCIENCE’ AND THE FUNCTIONS OF ANATOMICAL ILLUSTRATION In the age of Enlightenment, in which the sciences were under increasing pressure to legitimize themselves publically and to address interested laymen, disgust in the face of dead and flayed animals was a challenge which is not to be underestimated. In its complexity and uncensored physicality, anatomy was only partially compatible with the criteria of so-called ‘polite science’, which was defined by intelligibility, usefulness, sociability, conversation and elegance of verbal presentation.17 Anatomical demonstrations were certainly now and XIII