An Irishwoman's Diary

On this day in 1806, at about 9 o'clock in the morning, the celebrated self-taught English artist George Stubbs calmly remarked to some friends who had visited over breakfast, "Perhaps I am going to die". The friends had arrived at his London home on being summoned by Mary Spencer, Stubbs's companion of some 50 years' standing.

On the previous day, the artist, then six weeks short of his 82nd birthday, had, as was his custom, walked some eight or nine miles, during the course of making a number of business calls. He had seemed well and, having retired for the night at about nine o'clock in the evening, woke about 3am feeling "as well as ever he was in his life". On rising from his bed, however, he experienced, as his earliest biographer records, "a most excruciating spasm in his breast". His moans alerted Mary Spencer, who slept in the adjoining room. Within the hour, Stubbs appeared to have decided that the pains were not going to kill him and felt sufficiently well to rise, dress himself and go up and down the stairs several times, busy with arranging papers.

Among the documents was his will which he had drawn up several years earlier. On rereading it, he picked up a pencil and struck out the names of his sons, leaving Mary Spencer as his sole heir. It was obvious that he now suspected that those pains would in fact kill him.

Mary Spencer had sent a messenger to the Ricketts as well as a couple of other close friends who quickly made their way to Stubbs's home in Somerset Street. Stubbs sat calmly, inviting them to stay for breakfast, and sat down with them. By way of making conversation he said: "I fear not death, I have no particular wish to live. I had indeed hoped to finish my Comparative Anatomy ere I went, but for other things I have no anxiety."

He stood and returned to bed. But one of the women decided to follow him and her cries immediately brought the rest of the party to the bedroom. Stubbs was sitting in an armchair, dead.

Even in the act of dying "the ingenious Mr Stubbs" displayed the same deliberation, methodology and attention to detail that had shaped his career. It was he who elevated the painting of horses and other animals to high art. By intense study of anatomy and his scientific curiosity, he had become the consummate realist as well as a dedicated professional.

His ambition to be an elite history painter and serious artist was ably served by intelligence, application, talent, singular originality and an inherited work ethic sustained by his robust constitution.

In 1799, at the age of 75, he had painted his remarkable study of Sir Harry Vane-Tempest's racehorse Hambletonian in tetchy exhaustion after victory in one of the greatest match-races ever run. The huge work hangs at the National Trust property Mount Stewart, in Co Down. Years before, in 1762, he had painted a particularly temperamental subject, a 13-year-old stallion and favourite horse of Charles Watson-Wentworth, the second Marquess of Rockingham, who was twice British prime minister.

The flaxen-maned chestnut stallion is portrayed rearing and could well be the lord of his own desert kingdom except that he is well groomed and has been shod. Wary yet defiant, this is Whistlejacket, revered as an iconic representation of equine perfection and probably the most famous painting of a horse in Western culture.

Nothing was ever easy for Stubbs. Although he painted 14 pictures for the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, he never enjoyed the favour of the Royal Academy, nor commanded fees comparable to those paid to Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Born in Liverpool in 1724, Stubbs was the only son of a currier or leather worker. From about the age of five he demonstrated remarkable talent. Stubbs senior did not want the boy to become an artist and, according to Robin Blake, author of an outstanding biography, George Stubbs and the Wide Creation, dismissed painting "as nothing but a mountebank activity". When dying, however, he relented and advised his son, then almost 17, to seek out a good teacher.

Young Stubbs was a natural draughtsman and appears to have had little formal training. He served an apprenticeship to an artist but was more assistant than an art student. He learnt his drawing technique through practice and observation, not instruction.

He was not a classical scholar, but he had a classical sensibility and was influenced by Burke's theory of the sublime. He had also visited Rome and the classical approach to design was to shape his own approach. He left no letters or no journals, yet his work went far beyond classic studies of thoroughbred racehorses and the people who owned them to form a chronicle of Georgian rural society.

A period spent in York, then infamous for the extent of anatomical dissection being carried out, proved vital to Stubbs, who dissected and drew the human body. From this came his decision in 1756 to rent a barn near Hull. There he spent 18 months dissecting horses which were delivered to him live. He slaughtered them and suspended the carcasses from iron bars, then injected the veins with liquid wax. He then stripped away the skin and investigated the five muscle and tissue layers down to the skeleton.

From this filthy undertaking came his study, The Anatomy of the Horse, which he finally published in 1766. It was Stubbs who first mastered the art of painting horses as they are, and as they move.

There is no sentimentality in his work. He saw the beauty, the mystery, the tension, the remoteness and, at times, the pathos of that stoic enigma, the horse.