UNIT 3
British Painting
“Whistlejacket”
Whistlejacket is an oil-on-canvas painting from about 1762 by British artist George Stubbs showing the Marquess of Rockingham's racehorse, rearing up against a blank background. The huge canvas, lack of other features, and Stubbs' attention to the minute details of the horse's appearance give the portrait a powerful physical presence. It has been described in The Independent as "a paradigm of the flawless beauty of an Arabian thoroughbred".
Whistlejacket foaled in 1749, was the star racehorse of his day, famous for winning £2,000 in a race at York in 1759 for his owner, the second Marquess of Rockingham, who commissioned this painting.
Stubbs's colossal, almost three-metre-high painting depicts a horse as a solitary and splendid individual, with no people in the picture, no landscape, just a surrounding void that focuses our attention on the rearing racehorse - his shiny flanks, flying mane, brown eye looking back at us.
This painting fascinated contemporaries who hypothesised that it was really an unfinished equestrian portrait of George III. A landscape painter was supposed to have filled in the background and a portrait artist was going to do the king, but then political differences between the Marquess of Rockingham and the monarch meant that the picture was left unfinished. There's no proof of this story. The way Stubbs has painted the shadows under Whistlejacket's back feet suggests on the contrary that this painting looks the way he wanted it to. It is a romantic study in solitude and liberty, freeing Whistlejacket from the bridles and whips that surrounded him in life to gallop in unlimited abstract space.
Stubbs's picture is a portrait of an animal on the scale usually reserved for kings. A portrait is a study in individuality, at its most primitive an attempt to discover what makes someone recognisable as themselves. This might be a blemish or - as in Rembrandt's portraits - a consciousness. Stubbs specialised in painting horses in one of the great ages of the horse. In 18th century Britain horse breeding and racing was the passion of the aristocracy at the same time as it was becoming a popular spectator sport. Stubbs and his contemporaries were accustomed to recognising horses as individuals. Whistlejacket's individuality begins at the level of physiognomy and physical detail; Stubbs was an expert on animal anatomy, had even dissected a horse. By comparing this to his other paintings of horses you can see how much attention he paid to the horse's specific physical marks. The white area on Whistlejacket's back right foot functions as a cleft chin or a scar might on a human portrait, and the veins on his rear thigh stand up.
Yet this attention to external features is only one part of what makes this a great portrait. Stubbs is interested in the inner being of Whistlejacket, his character, his self, and that is what he captures here: the incredible tension, energy and sensitivity in the way the horse rears, the electricity in the taut muscles, the look of something that might be terror in his face.
Whistlejacket wasn't saying, but aristocratic owners hired Stubbs to paint many more mares, foals and race winners, so the implication that the horse is a free spirit confined by an oppressive human society obviously passed them by.