A Lion Attacking a Horse

Stubbs made his living painting the prized racehorses of the English aristocracy, calm and glossy in their paddocks. In 1762 he did something startling with all that anatomical skill. He turned it on a horse being killed. A lion has brought the animal down and sinks its claws into its back, and the horse's head is thrown back in terror. The idea was not drawn from life but from an ancient marble Stubbs had seen years earlier on a trip to Rome, a Hellenistic group of a lion seizing a horse. His patron, the Marquess of Rockingham, paid for it at the end of the year. It was the first of sixteen times Stubbs would return to this violent subject, and at over two metres tall the canvas now fills a wall at Yale.