Animalia, Autopsia, Natura: George Stubbs’s The Moose, 1770
‘Mr. Stubbs, an artist not less happy in representing animals in their still moments, than when agitated by their furious passions; his matchless paintings of horses will be lasting monuments of the one; and that of the lion and panther the other’.
Thomas Pennant, British Zoology, 1776-77.
Two paintings belonging to the original collections of the physician and anatomist, Dr. William Hunter (1718-1783), now in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, are believed to have been commissioned from George Stubbs, while Hunter was engaged in research on comparative anatomy: one, the Nylgai (1769), in the possession of Queen Charlotte and the other, The Moose (1770), belonging to the Duke of Richmond. Both paintings demonstrate the close professional relationship between Stubbs and Hunter in the middle years of the eighteenth century, with Hunter tellingly remarking that The Nylgai was painted by Stubbs ‘under my eye’, confusing the authorship between artist and anatomist. While Stubbs’s Nylgai formed the basis of Hunter’s paper presented to the Royal Society in 1771, his researches on the Moose were not published and existed as manuscript notes only for many years. Remaining in such obscurity, The Moose, appears to be an unlikely exemplar of the sublime works by Stubbs referred to in Thomas Pennant’s quotation from British Zoology cited above. However, this paper asks how The Moose might be incorporated amongst Stubbs’s pioneering works of animal painting by suggesting that the artist’s keen knowledge of comparative anatomy, zoology and natural history are present in the rather somber and solitary image of the Moose, or Canadian Elk. Much of the cultural fascination surrounding this animal in the eighteenth century originated in ideas of migration, domestication and extinction and Hunter was particularly intrigued by such theories. In his depiction of the Moose, Stubbs encompasses a significant range of ideas current within art and science debates during the period. As this paper explains, the painting owes more to the sublime meanings of Edmund Burke’s essay and the subjective expressiveness of the artist’s imagination than might at first seem apparent. It is no coincidence that Stubbs’s naturalist friend Pennant chose the image to illustrate Plate VII of his Arctic Zoology, (1784-1785); combined with lines from James Thomson’s, poem, The Seasons, ‘Winter’ (1726), The Moose represents the artist’s understanding of pure description and of the interconnectedness of living species. Situated between Stubbs’s series of great works depicting a horse attacked by a lion and the potentially ground-breaking Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl (1795-1806), Hunter’s commission to paint a singular species type, the Moose, presented the artist with an opportunity to create a subtle work of moving imagery that invokes critical debates of the time concerning the representation of the natural world and of the production of knowledge more generally, and are explored in this paper.