George Stubbs : “Zebra” (1763)

George Stubbs was perhaps the most accomplished animal painter of his time. A largely self-taught artist, his technique was honed by a lifelong passion for anatomy. From 1745 to 1751 he studied human anatomy at York County Hospital and in 1756 rented a farmhouse in Lincolnshire, where he spent 18 months dissecting horses. In addition to the equine subjects for which he is best-known, he painted portraits, dogs and hounds, pastorals, historical subjects and exotic animals.

His Zebra depicts the first of its kind seen in England. It was brought from South Africa in 1762 as a gift to Queen Charlotte and displayed in the menagerie at Buckingham Palace. There it quickly became a sensation with the public, who turned out in droves for a glimpse of “the Queen’s she-ass.” “Stubbs’s grasp of the anatomical differences between zebras and horses,” notes Angus Trumble of the Yale Center for British Art,” is, of course, masterly, and in the present work the backward direction of the ears, the dewlap on the underside of the neck or the front, and the ‘gridiron’ pattern of the stripes on the nether regions, immediately above the tail — all these are exactly consistent with zoological verisimilitude and, in fact, identify the present animal as the smallest of three subspecies of zebra, the Cape Mountain.”