George Stubbs. George Stubbs was an English painter, best known for his paintings of horses.
   Self-trained, Stubbs learnt his skills independently from other great artists of the eighteenth century such as Reynolds or Gainsborough. Stubbs' output includes history paintings, but his greatest skill was in painting animals, perhaps influenced by his love and study of anatomy.
   His most famous painting, Whistlejacket, hangs in the National Galler y, London. Stubbs was born in Liverpool, the son of a currier, or leather-dresser, John Stubbs, and his wife Mary.
   Information on his life until the age of 35 or so is sparse, relying almost entirely on notes made by Ozias Humphry, a fellow artist and friend; Humphry's informal memoir, which was not intended for publication, was based on a series of private conversations he had with Stubbs around 1794, when Stubbs was 70 years old, and Humphry 52. Stubbs worked at his father's trade until the age of 15 or 16, at which point he told his father that he wished to become a painter. While initially resistant, Stubbs's father, eventually acquiesced in his son's choice of a career path, on the condition that he could find an appropriate mentor.
   Stubbs subsequently approached the Lancashire painter and engraver Hamlet Winstanley, and was briefly engaged by him in a sort of apprenticeship relationship, probably not more than several weeks in duration. Having initia
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