Уислджекет

Around 1762 the Marquess of Rockingham, a rich Yorkshire landowner with a stable of some 200 horses, had George Stubbs paint his racehorse Whistlejacket at life size, rearing, against nothing at all. That empty background was startling. Equine portraits of the day came with grooms, jockeys, a country house, a stretch of turf. Here there is only the horse, its coat and muscle studied with the accuracy of a man who dissected horses to learn them. Contemporaries were so surprised that stories grew up around it. One tells that Whistlejacket, led past the near-finished canvas, took the painted horse for a rival and lashed out at it. Rockingham was briefly one of the most powerful men in Britain, twice prime minister, but it is his horse that still fills a wall of the National Gallery.