Whistlejacket
Catalogue entry
George Stubbs ARA 1724–1806
NG 6569
Whistlejacket
2000
,Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).
?
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 .
[page 241][page 242]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 Ye 15th 1762 Recd of the Most Honble 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 3d 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.
[page 246]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.
1. In a letter of 17 October 1771 to Peter Camper, Professor of Anatomy at Gröningen, who had written to him praising The Anatomy of the Horse and hoping that Stubbs would deepen his anatomical research, Stubbs wrote: ‘What you have seen is all I meant to do, it being as much as I thought necessary for the study of Painting, and being too well employ’d in my Profession of Painting to spare the time, if I had been qualify’d. but I look’d very little into the internal parts of a Horse, my search there being only a matter of curiosity’ (Bibliothecaris der Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden). (Back to text.)
2. The 3rd Duke of Richmond with the Charlton Hunt, ? 1759; Henry Fox and the Earl of Albemarle shooting at Goodwood, ? 1759; The Duchess of Richmond and Lady Louisa Lennox watching the Duke’s Racehorses at Exercise, [page 247]? 1760; all coll. Trustees of the Goodwood Collection, Goodwood House, Chichester; Egerton 1984, cat. nos. 28, 30, 31, all repr. (Back to text.)
3. The index in Egerton 1984 will offer pointers to examples of Stubbs’s work for all these noblemen except the Duke of Portland; Stubbs’s work for him was not available for the 1984 exhibition, but an example is repr. in Taylor 1971, fig. 37. (Back to text.)
4. For Stubbs’s work for Lord Grosvenor, see Judy Egerton, ‘The Painter and the Peer; Stubbs and the Patronage of the 1st Lord Grosvenor’, Country Life, 22 November 1979, pp. 1892–3. For The Grosvenor Hunt and Lord Grosvenor’s Mares and Foals, see Egerton 1984, cat. nos. 39 and 90, both repr. (Back to text.)
5. See DNB ; also Ross J.S. Hoffman, The Marquis: A Study of Lord Rockingham, 1730–2, New York 1973, passim . (Back to text.)
6. First at the age of four, noted on p. 246. The prime version of Reynolds’s full‐length portrait of him in Garter robes, 1768, is coll. Trustees of the Rt. Hon. Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels Settlement; several replicas (including one coll. Her Majesty The Queen, Millar 1969, cat. no. 1045) and reduced versions. Reynolds’s double portrait Lord Rockingham and his Secretary, Edmund Burke (coll. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; repr. ed. Penny 1986, cat. no. 70, pp. 236–8, and in colour p. 117) carries deliberate echoes of the double portrait in Rockingham’s collection of the Earl of Strafford with his secretary, Sir Philip Mainwaring. (Back to text.)
7. For the building and reconstruction of Wentworth Woodhouse, see Hussey 1955, pp. 147–54. Fig. 242 reproduces a photograph of its east front, 660 ft long (the façade of the National Gallery is 462 ft long). See also H. Avery Tipping, ‘Wentworth Woodhouse’, Country Life, 1924: Part I, 20 September, pp. 438–44; Part II, 27 September, pp. 476–83; Part III, 4 October, pp. 512–19; Part IV, 11 October, pp. 554–62. (Back to text.)
8. For photographs of the display of sculpture in the Great Hall and elsewhere at Wentworth, see Hussey 1955, fig. 246; Penny 1991 (cited in note 9) passim (Back to text.)
9. For a most informative and well‐illustrated account of Rockingham as a collector of sculpture, see Nicholas Penny, ‘Lord Rockingham’s Sculpture Collection and The Judgment of Paris by Nollekens’, J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, 19, 1991, pp. 5–34. For Rockingham’s Grand Tour see Ingamells 1997, pp. 631–3. (Back to text.)
10. See Penny 1991 (cited above) pp. 18–19. Two of the Giambologna bronzes can be seen on top of the chimneypiece in the library at Wentworth in a photograph repr. Penny, p. 18, fig. 16. (Back to text.)
11. Quoted in Ingamells 1997, p. 632. (Back to text.)
12. Walpole to Mann, 27 April 1755, Walpole Correspondence, vol. XX, p. 373. (Back to text.)
13. Quoted by Hoffmann 1973 (cited in note 5), p. 14. (Back to text.)
14. Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, Rl‐776. (Back to text.)
15. The Marquess of Rockingham’s Account Book and Stubbs’s receipts for payments are Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments (A/1000). (Back to text.)
16. The groom’s name has long been given as Simon Cobb. Rockingham’s correspondence over his horses is with Joshua Cobb, but there may have been two Cobbs (? father and son, or brothers) in his employ. (Back to text.)
17. Coll. Trustees of the Rt. Hon. Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels Settlement; see Egerton 1984, cat. no. 35, repr. p. 62. (Back to text.)
18. Waterhouse 1953, p. 205. (Back to text.)
19. The Godolphin Arabian, foaled in the Yemen in 1724 and imported into England soon afterwards, was so‐called after entering the 2nd Earl of Godolphin’s stud at Newmarket. He died in 1753. Stubbs’s posthumous portrait of him (based on a print by David Morier) was included in his series of notable horses engraved by George Townly Stubbs, 1794, and published in A Review of the Turf (repr. Lennox‐Boyd, Dixon and Clayton 1989, cited under Engraved, p. 236). The other two most famous Arabian imports were the Byerley Turk (captured by Captain (later Colonel) Byerley at Buda in 1688, and brought to England) and the Darley Arabian (foaled in 1700, imported to join Mr Darley’s stud in Yorkshire). See Roger Longrigg, The History of Horse Racing, London 1972, pp. 57–61. (Back to text.)
20. Whistlejacket’s pedigree is given in William Pick, The Turf Register and Sportsman and Breeder’s Stud‐Book, 1803, 1, pp. 154–5. The compiler is indebted to Lorraine Moran of Weatherbys for this information. See also An Authentic Historical Racing Calendar of all the Plates, Sweepstakes, Matches &c . run for at York, from…1709,…to 1785, in which is also given pedigrees and performances of the most celebrated racehorses, that have appeared on the English turf, York [1785]. (Back to text.)
21. In the Wentworth Inventory made after the 2nd Marquess’s death in 1782, these are nos 133 and 136; no. 131 is a portrait of a horse and jockey by Wootton. All three have remained in the collection of his heirs. (Back to text.)
22. Rockingham commissioned two portraits of John Singleton from Stubbs: Scrub with John Singleton up, 1762, and Bay Malton with John Singleton up, c. 1765; both coll. Trustees of the Rt. Hon. Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels Settlement. (Back to text.)
23. Horace Walpole to Richard Bentley, August 1766; Walpole Correspondence, vol. XXXV, p. 267. (Back to text.)
24. Whistlejacket’s progeny, listed by Pick (cited in note 20), include Mr Pigott’s Coriolanus and Roscius, Lord Grosvenor’s Scoles, Lord Rockingham’s Rambler and Lord Ossory’s Laura, the latter (the most successful racehorse got by Whistlejacket) painted by Stubbs in 1771, with a jockey and stable‐lad (exh. Whitechapel Art Gallery, George Stubbs, 1957 , no. 20). (Back to text.)
25. Whistlejacket is not even mentioned in J. Fairfax Blakeborough, Northern Turf History, 3 vols, York 1950. (Back to text.)
26. Act IV; the play was first produced in 1773. (Back to text.)
27. See ed. Stella Walker, Summerhays’ Encyclopaedia for Horsemen, 6th edn, London 1975, pp. 13–14. (Back to text.)
28. Ed. Paget Toynbee, p. 71. Walpole had previously visited Wentworth Woodhouse in August 1766; writing to Richard Bentley that month, he describes the grounds and the ‘modern front’, but mentions only a few pictures (none by Stubbs), and may not have seen much of the interior on that occasion (Walpole Correspondence, vol. XXXV, p. 267). (Back to text.)
29. See Laing 1995, p. 14, describing her role (‘It was an important part of the business of house servants – and generally of the housekeeper – to show respectable visitors around notable houses’) and her portrait by Thomas Barber (cat. no. 1, repr.). (Back to text.)
30. The equestrian monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni, modelled by Andrea Verrocchio and cast in bronze after his death; erected in the Campo Scuola di San Marco, Venice, and unveiled in 1496. (Back to text.)
31. Coll. Prado, Madrid; see Hans Vlieghe, Rubens Portraits, Corpus Rubenianum, Part xix, II, cat no. 93, plate 76. This is perhaps the best‐known of Rubens’s equestrian portraits. (Back to text.)
32. By Abraham van Diepenbeeck, engraved by Caukercken, published in William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, A General System of Horsemanship (Antwerp 1658), London 1743, facsimile edn New York 1970. (Back to text.)
33. See José
Lópes
López
‐Rey, Velázquez, London 1963, cat. nos. 187, 199, 220; plates 83, 85, 95. (Back to text.)
34. Coll. Louvre, Versailles; repr. Anita Brookner, Jacques‐Louis David, London 1980, plate 74. (Back to text.)
35. See Taylor 1971, p. 49. note 10. (Back to text.)
36. Brian Sewell, in an article on Whistlejacket’s arrival in the NG (‘The Stallion that stands alone in Greatness’, Evening Standard, 27 June 1996, pp. 28–9), reproduces a page of sketches by Leonardo da Vinci for a monument to Gian Giacomo Trivulzio. In these, the horse’s head is turned towards the spectator, but at the command of the rider, who is putting him through a movement to the right. (Back to text.)
37. Waagen 1854, III, p. 339. (Back to text.)
38. Constantine 1953, p. 237. (Back to text.)
39. Coll. Yale Center; repr. Egerton 1984, pp. 92–3, cat. nos. 60–1. (Back to text.)
40. Both coll. Trustees of the Rt. Hon. Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam’s Chattels Settlement. Sampson, originally left without a background, is repr. Constantine 1953, with a background added by ? George Barrett, recently painted over (but not ineradicably) at the owners’ request. The Arabian at Creswell Crags is repr. Egerton 1984, cat. no. 72, repr. pp. 72–3 . (Back to text.)
41. See Constantine 1953, p. 238. (Back to text.)
42. A photograph of the room, showing Whistlejacket in situ, is repr. Hussey 1955, fig. 252. (Back to text.)
Abbreviations
- d.s.p.
- died sine prole (without issue)
- NG
- National Gallery, London
- RA
- Royal Academy of Arts, London; Royal Academician
- V&A
- Victoria and Albert Museum, London
List of archive references cited
- Liverpool, Liverpool City Libraries, Picton Collection: Ozias Humphry, Particulars of the Life of Mr Stubbs… given to the author … by himself and committed from his own relation, MS, c.1790–7
- Wentworth Woodhouse, Muniments, A/1000: Marquess of Rockingham, account book
- Wentworth Woodhouse, Muniments, A/1000: George Stubbs, receipts for payments
- Wentworth Woodhouse, Muniments, Rl‐776: Joshua Cobb, letter to the Marquess of Rockingham, 9 April 1769
List of references cited
- Avery Tipping 1924
- Avery Tipping, H., ‘Wentworth Woodhouse: Part I’, Country Life, 20 September 1924, 438–44; ‘Part II’, 27 September 1924, 476–83; ‘Part III’, 4 October 1924, 512–19; ‘Part IIV’, 11 October 1924, 554–62
- Brookner 1980
- Brookner, Anita, Jacques‐Louis David, London 1980
- Cavendish 1743
- Cavendish, William, Duke of Newcastle, A General System of Horsemanship in all it’s [sic] Branches: containing a faithful translation of that most noble and useful work of his grace, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle …, 2 vols, London 1743 (facsimile edn, New York 1970; 1st edn, Antwerp 1658)
- Constantine 1953
- Constantine, H.F., ‘Lord Rockingham and Stubbs; Some New Documents’, Burlington Magazine, 1953, XCV, 236–8
- Davies 1946a
- Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The British School, London 1946 (revised edn, London 1959)
- Davies 1959
- Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The British School, revised edn, London 1959
- Dictionary of National Biography
- Dictionary of National Biography, London 1885– (Oxford 1917–)
- Egerton 1979
- Egerton, Judy, ‘The Painter and the Peer: Stubbs and the Patronage of the 1st Lord Grosvenor’, Country Life, 22 November 1979, 1892–3
- Egerton 1984
- Egerton, Judy, George Stubbs, with contributions from Robert Shepherd, Ian McClure, Rupert Featherstone and Lynn Koehnline (exh. cat. Tate Gallery, London, and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven), London 1984
- Fairfax Blakeborough 1950
- Fairfax Blakeborough, J., Northern Turf History, 3 vols, York 1950
- Goldsmith 1773
- Goldsmith, Oliver, She Stoops to Conquer, 1773
- Hoffman 1973
- Hoffman, Ross J.S., The Marquis: A Study of Lord Rockingham 1730–2, New York 1973
- Hussey 1955
- Hussey, Christopher, ‘Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire’, in English Country Houses: Early Georgian 1715–1760, London 1955
- Ingamells 1997
- Ingamells, John, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800: Compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive, New Haven and London 1997
- Laing 1995
- Laing, Alastair, In Trust for the Nation: Paintings from National Trust Houses (exh. cat. National Gallery, London), London 1995
- Lennox-Boyd, Dixon and Clayton 1989
- Lennox‐Boyd, Christopher, Rob Dixon and Tim Clayton, George Stubbs: The Complete Engraved Works, London 1989
- Longrigg 1972
- Longrigg, Roger, The History of Horse Racing, London 1972
- López‐Rey 1963
- López‐Rey, José, Velázquez, London 1963
- Millar 1969
- Millar, Oliver, The Later Georgian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, 2 vols, London 1969
- Parker 1971
- Parker, Constance‐Anne, Mr Stubbs the Horse Painter, London 1971
- Penny 1986
- Penny, Nicholas, ed., Reynolds (exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts), London 1986
- Penny 1991
- Penny, Nicholas, ‘Lord Rockingham’s Sculpture Collection and The Judgment of Paris by Nollekens’, J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, 1991, 19
- Pick 1803
- Pick, William, The Turf Register and Sportsman and Breeder’s Stud‐Book, 1803
- Racing Calendar 1785
- An Authentic Historical Racing Calendar of all the Plates, Sweepstakes, Matches &c. run for at York, from…1709,…to 1785, in which is also given pedigrees and performances of the most celebrated racehorses, that have appeared on the English turf, York [1785]
- Sewell 1996
- Sewell, Brian, ‘The Stallion that stands alone in Greatness’, Evening Standard, 27 June 1996
- Stubbs 1766
- Stubbs, George, The Anatomy of the Horse
- Taylor 1971
- Taylor, Basil, Stubbs, London 1971 (2nd edn, 1975)
- Vlieghe 1977
- Vlieghe, Hans, Rubens Portraits, Corpus Rubenianum, 1977
- Waagen 1854
- Waagen, Gustav Friedrich, Treasures of Art in Great Britain: Being an Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings…, ed. and trans. Lady E. Eastlake, 3 vols, London 1854 (Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain, London 1857, supplement (vol. 4))
- Walker 1975
- Walker, Stella, Summerhays’ Encyclopaedia for Horsemen, 6th edn, London 1975
- Walpole 1927–8
- Walpole, Horace, ‘Horace Walpole’s Journals of Visits to Country Seats’, ed. Paget Toynbee, The Walpole Society, 1927–1928 (1928), XVI, 9–80
- Walpole 1937–83
- Lewis, W.S., et al., eds, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols, New Haven 1937–83
- Waterhouse 1953
- Waterhouse, Ellis, Painting in Britain 1530–1790, London 1953 (2nd edn, 1962)
List of exhibitions cited
- London 1971–81
- London, Kenwood House, long–term loan, 1971–81
- London 1971
- London, Kenwood House, 1971
- London 1996–1997
- London, National Gallery, on loan, April 1996–1997
- London and New Haven 1984–5
- London, Tate Gallery; New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, George Stubbs 1724–1806, 18 October 1984–6 January 1985 (London) and 13 February–7 April 1985 (New Haven) (exh. cat.: Egerton 1984)
Arrangement of the Catalogue
This is a catalogue of the 61 works which represent the British School in the National
Gallery now, at the beginning of 1998. The first Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, with Critical Remarks
on their Merits, by W. Young Ottley, was published in 1832 (earlier catalogues were hardly more than hand‐lists). The first scholarly catalogue
devoted to the Gallery’s British pictures – National Gallery Catalogues: The British School – was compiled by Martin Davies (Director 1968–73). Its first edition in 1946 included 333 pictures. By 1959, when Davies published a revised edition (following large transfers of pictures upon
the Tate’s separation
in 1954
from the National Gallery in 1954), the number of British pictures in the National
Gallery had been reduced to 99.
Martin Davies’s British School catalogue still stands as a model of concise record and meticulous (sometimes astringent) footnotes. This catalogue is chattier. I have tried to combine accurate information about the making and subsequent history of the pictures with more concern for their subject matter than Martin Davies allowed himself. Here I share to the full Neil MacGregor’s conviction that the public should have as much information as possible about their pictures. In a collection still dominated by portraits, much information about sitters (men, women and, in the largest portrait of all, a horse) is available; some of it may help to assess how far a portraitist has succeeded in reflecting [page 17]individual character. The background information offered here can, of course, be skipped, leaving the illustrations – or better still, the actual works – to speak for themselves.
All the works have been examined in the company of Martin Wyld, the Gallery’s Chief Restorer. He has compiled all the Technical Notes except for those on Hogarth’s Marriage A‐la‐Mode, which have been contributed by David Bomford. Many of these Technical Notes incorporate the results of detailed examination by Ashok Roy, Head of the Scientific Department, and by his colleagues Raymond White and Jennie Pilc. The bibliography of published work on the techniques and pigments used by artists during the period covered by this catalogue (pp. 432–5) has been compiled by Jo Kirby of the Gallery’s Scientific Department.
The catalogue is arranged in the two parts into which it fairly naturally falls. Part I catalogues the well‐known and deservedly popular works which are nearly always on view (except when lent to outside exhibitions). The artists represented in it are Constable, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Thomas Jones, Lawrence, Reynolds, Sargent, Stubbs, Turner, Wilson, Wright of Derby and Zoffany, arranged in alphabetical order, with their works (when more than one) in their known (or likely) chronological sequence. The time‐span of works by this small group of twelve artists is hardly more than 150 years, from Hogarth’s six paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode, of about 1742, to Sargent’s Lord Ribblesdale, dated 1902. In this part of the catalogue, movements of pictures to and from the Tate are briefly noted (below the heading Exhibited), such information being offered to reassure those who remember seeing, say, Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump in the Tate rather than in the National Gallery (or recalling locations given in past literature) that their recollection was not at fault. Under this heading, movements for short periods usually indicate loans supplied by the Tate to fill gaps on the National Gallery walls when it lent pictures for exhibition elsewhere. ‘Tate 1960–1’, frequently noted, indicates the period of the Gallery’s winter exhibition National Gallery Acquisitions 1953–62 ; to make room for this exhibition, most of its British School pictures were accommodated and displayed in the Tate Gallery.
Part II catalogues the Gallery’s collection of portraits (including four marble busts) of those who played significant parts in the history of the National Gallery itself. Since it is in a sense a narrative (though an incomplete one) of the Gallery’s history, Part II is presented chronologically, according to the various sitters’ relationships to the National Gallery. Lawrence is the only artist to appear in both parts of this catalogue (his portrait of *Queen Charlotte appears in Part I, his two portraits of *John Julius Angerstein in Part II). In this group, Sir George Beaumont (grudgingly sitting to Hoppner, an artist he habitually denigrated) will be a familiar figure in the history of British art. Other Trustees and benefactors – preeminently, perhaps, Layard of Nineveh – will be better known outside the perspectives of the National Gallery, while two of its minor heroes – William Seguier, the Gallery’s first Keeper, and William Boxall RA , its second Director – may hardly be known at all.
Few portraits of National Gallery benefactors were ever transferred to the Tate; the only exceptions appear to be the transfer of the first version of Linnell’s portrait of Samuel Rogers (the National Gallery retaining a second version) and the transfer in 1949 of Hoppner’s portrait of Charles Long, Lord Farnborough, accepted by the National Gallery as a gift in 1934, but hung for a few months only, before being pronounced by Sir Kenneth Clark (Director, 1933–45) ‘not worth a place’. The National Gallery retains a finer image of Long in the form of Chantrey’s marble bust. Most of the works in Part II are hung in the Reception Area or the Reserve Collection.
All but one of the benefactors who figure in Part II have one thing in common: they bought pictures, but begat no heirs, and therefore chose to give or bequeath paintings to the National Gallery. The exception is the actor‐manager Thomas Denison Lewis, who in 1849 bequeathed not only *Mr Lewis as The Marquis in the Midnight Hour (Shee’s portrait of his famous actor‐father), but also £10,000 for future Gallery purchases. Prudently invested, the Lewis Fund enabled the purchase of many National Gallery pictures of all schools, including two much‐loved British pictures: the Heads of Six of Hogarth’s Servants and Gainsborough’s *Cornard Wood. The Hogarth was transferred to the Tate in 1960: thus, unknowingly, Lewis became a benefactor to both institutions.
Ann
An
Appendix includes provisional catalogue entries for *Portrait of a Lady, painted by Cornelius Johnson (or Jonson van Ceulen) after his return to Holland,
and *On the Delaware, by the wholly American painter George Inness. Both were included in Martin Davies’s
British School catalogue, but since they do not properly belong to the British School, they will
eventually be included in more appropriate Schools catalogues.
About this version
Version 1, generated from files JE_2000__16.xml dated 14/10/2024 and database__16.xml dated 16/10/2024 using stylesheet 16_teiToHtml_externalDb.xsl dated 14/10/2024. Structural mark-up applied to skeleton document in full; entry for NG524, biography for Turner and associated front and back matter (marked up in pilot project) reintegrated into main document; document updated to use external database of archival and bibliographic references; entries for NG1207, NG130, NG925, NG6301, NG1811, NG6209, NG113-NG118, NG1162, NG6544, NG4257, NG681, NG3044, NG6569, NG538, NG6196-NG6197 and NG725 proofread and prepared for publication; entries for NG113-NG118, NG1207, NG1811, NG4257, NG524, NG538, NG6209, NG6301, NG6569 and NG725 proofread following mark-up and corrected.
Cite this entry
- Permalink (this version)
- https://data.ng.ac.uk/0880-000B-0000-0000
- Permalink (latest version)
- https://data.ng.ac.uk/086Q-000B-0000-0000
- Chicago style
- Egerton, Judy. "NG 6569, Whistlejacket". 2000, online version 1, October 17, 2024. https://data.ng.ac.uk/0880-000B-0000-0000.
- Harvard style
- Egerton, Judy (2000) NG 6569, Whistlejacket. Online version 1, London: National Gallery, 2024. Available at: https://data.ng.ac.uk/0880-000B-0000-0000 (Accessed: 11 November 2024).
- MHRA style
- Egerton, Judy, NG 6569, Whistlejacket (National Gallery, 2000; online version 1, 2024) <https://data.ng.ac.uk/0880-000B-0000-0000> [accessed: 11 November 2024]