Whistlejacket is an oil painting on canvas from around 1762 by British artist George Stubbs showing the Marquess of Rockingham racehorse roughly the size of a human, raised with a simple background. The canvas is large, has no other content except some secret shadow, and Stubbs has paid proper attention to details of horse appearance. This has been described in The Independent as "the perfect beauty paradigm of the Arab descendants". The Fitzwilliam family, the heirs of Rockingham without children, retained the painting until 1997 when funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund enabled the National Gallery, London to earn it for £ 11 million.
Stubbs was a special horse artist who in 1762 was invited by Rockingham to spend "a few months" at Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, home of his main country. Stubbs has painted many portraits of horses, with and without human figures, but the heroic scale and lack of Whistlejacket background is "unprecedented" in his work and equates portraits in general and "his contemporaries were so shocked that a single horse had to order a large canvas that the legend quickly developed "explains why the painting is not finished yet, nothing seems reasonable or supported by evidence for modern art historians. In fact, Stubbs's earliest canvas on his visit in 1762 included a pair of smaller paintings of a standing horse group, one including Whistlejacket, in a horizontal "classic decoration-like" format with a cream background of the same damaged honey only by a small shadow on the foot. It seems to leave a portrait without the usual landscape background is the Rockingham idea.
Stubbs describes Whistlejacket rising to level, but with his head turned toward the viewer, in poses comparable to previous monumental riding portraits, including examples by Rubens and VelÃzzquez, but in this emphasis is on the rider. Here the horse itself and in its natural state, produces a "romantic study of solitude and freedom". Like many of Stubbs's other paintings of horses and other animals in the wild, including some versions of horses the lion attacked on his back, the painting was an early gesture of Romanticism, as well as a challenge to painting low-animal animals. occupied in the genre hierarchy.
To a greater extent than the previous painters, Stubbs produced a truly individual portrait of horses, with attention to details of their form. Minutes of defects, veins, and muscles that flex just below the surface of the skin are all visible and reproduced with great care and realism. Whistlejacket has retired after a fairly successful racing career, but is painted in this unusual form to show "the exquisite specimens of an Arabian horse raised purely at its best".
Video Whistlejacket
Melukis riwayat
Stubb's knowledge of the physiology of horses is unmatched by any painter; he had studied anatomy in York and, from 1756, he spent 18 months in Lincolnshire where he performed surgery and experiments on dead horses to better understand animal physiology. He suspends corpses with blocks and tackles to better able to sketch them in different positions. The careful notes and drawings he made during his studies were published in 1766 at The Anatomy of the Horse. Even before the publication of his book, Stubbs's dedication to his subject reaped the award: his image was acknowledged more accurately than the work of other horse artists and the commissions of the aristocratic patrons soon followed.
Charles Watson-Wentworth, the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham was a Whig politician, who later became the Prime Minister twice, and was very rich even by the standards of the rich group. In 1762 he commissioned Stubbs to produce a series of portraits of his horse, one of which was Whistlejacket. He was also an art collector, commissioning several works in Italy on the Grand Tour in the late 1740s, but his interest was great, usually for his class, horse racing and gambling. His wife writes of her hopes that she will limit herself to gambling "right on the grass, because there's always the possibility of some kind of fun in that, but not the smallest in the other kind." Wentworth House, as it is known, has been "rebuilt by his father on a grand scale" and blank walls need to be filled. Horace Walpole, on the 1766 visit mentioned below, complained of an unpalatable garden "This master does not like anything but horses, and the cage for them happens everything".
The Wentworth Archive, "although very comprehensive, contains no clear reference to the commission for painting Whistlejacket," although some indication of a possible price comes from a receipt by Stubbs dated December 30, 1762 for "Eighty Guineas for one Picture of the Lion and another Great Horse as Life ", may be a different image for a London home in Rockingham. Earlier in 1762, Stubbs had painted Whistlejacket's second portrait, with two unnamed stallions and a groom, Joshua or Simon Cobb.
According to a story in Stubbs's biography by his friend and fellow painter Ozias Humphrey, when the portrait was nearing completion, Whistle snuggled up unintentionally in front of him by a stable boy and reacted violently, treating him as a rival horse, and lifting him. the boy held him fully from the ground in an attempt to attack the painting. This story may have come from Stubbs himself, but it may be too good to be true; it clearly remembers the famous story of Pliny the Elder about Zeuxis and Parrhasius.
When Wentworth was rebuilt under Earl Fitzwilliam, a 40-foot "Whistlejacket Room" room was made to showcase the painting, with only one family portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence to accompany him. Wentworth Woodhouse ceased to be occupied by the family after World War II, and the painting was loaned to Kenwood House in London from 1971-1981, Tate Gallery 1984-85, and National Gallery from 1996 before being purchased the following year. It is now displayed in the middle of room 34, and is framed by a door at the end of a long enfilade so that it can be seen through ten rooms mixing from the other end of the gallery at the Sainsbury Wing. It is consistently among the ten most popular National Gallery paintings in various forms of reproduction. The painting was in "very good" and "coated, cleaned and restored a few years before the acquisition."
Legend like to home
One story is that Rockingham intends to commission a riding portrait of George III; Stubbs will paint horses while two portrait painters and other famous landscapes will fill kings and landscapes respectively. In one note, the painting was intended to accompany the equally identical George II equestrian portrait by David Morier, but Rockingham later changed his mind. According to Horace Walpole, on a visit to Wentworth where he may have been shown by the housekeeper, the painting was intended as a gift to the King, but Rockingham is said to be uninterrupted to support the progress of the painting after falling out of favor, and ordering him to hang in an unfinished Wentworth Woodhouse.
Another popular reason given for "unfinished" is that Rockingham was so impressed by Whistlejacket's angry reaction when confronted by Stubbs who worked on the painting in his palace, that he ordered it hanged without further decoration. Stubbs produced other horse drawings with a blank background for Rockingham, none in the painting showing that he was incomplete, and the detail of the shadow thrown by Whistlejacket's back foot on the ground indicated that this was the way Stubbs wanted the picture to be seen.
Maps Whistlejacket
Horse history
Whistlejacket is a chestnut horse, with a yellow-colored mane and tail, believed to be the original dye of a wild Arab breed. He was a crowded horse in 1749 in Sir William Middleton's stud, 3 Baronet at Belsay Castle in Northumberland, and was named after a contemporary cold medicine containing gin and treacle. His father is Mogul and grandsire is Arab Godolphin; through his dam, he was also descended from Byerly Turk, and various other Arabs and Turks. He ran from 1752, winning many races in the North. He lost to Jason on the King's Plate in Newmarket in 1755, but won the following year, and was also almost beaten by the Spectator for Jockey Club Plate at Newmarket in 1756. He was sold immediately after to the Marquess of Rockingham. He famously won a four-mile race in York in August 1759 against a strong field, defeated Brutus with a long, and then retired to stud, to ten years.
He was beaten only four times in his racing career, but was famously temperamental and difficult to manage. He "averaged success in stud", and had to die before the death of Rockingham in 1782, as he was not listed in the next sales record of the stud; he'll be in his thirties if he lives. He is not nearly as famous as the horse as his son and grandfather, but is mentioned in Act IV of the classic drama comic Oliver Goldsmith She Stoops to Conquer (1773) when the elopement is planned: "I you have a pair of horses that will fly like Whistlejacket ".
Note
References
- Egerton (1998): Egerton, Judy, National Gallery Catalogs (new series): The British School , 1998, ISBNÃ, 1857091701
- "George Stubbs". National Gallery . Retrieved 2010-04-01 . Jones, Jonathan (2000-04-22). "Whistlejacket, George Stubbs (1762)". London: The Guardian . Retrieved 2010-04-01 .
- Landry, Donna, Noble Brutes: How the East Horses Transforms British Culture , 2008, JHU Press, ISBNÃ, 0801890284, 9780801890284, google book
- " Whistlejacket ". National Gallery . Retrieved 2010-04-01 .
Further reading
- George Stubbs, painter: catalog raisonnÃÆ' Â © , Judy Egerton, Yale Press University, 2007, ISBNÃ, 0-300-12509-7
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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