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THE ENGRAVED WORK OF GEORGE STUBBS (1724-1806), one of England's greatest painters, is the subject of a major exhibition curated by The British Sporting Art Trust and hosted by Bonhams, London W1 from Monday 25 July to Friday 12 August 2005, complementing the concurrent exhibition of Stubbs and the Horse at London’s National Gallery.

The exhibition will be the largest and most comprehensive ever held of Stubbs’ engraved work. Not only will it display the beauty of the artist’s masterful compositions, but also the skill of the 18th century engravers who interpreted them. Anthony Barbour, Chairman of the British Sporting Art Trust, says: “Despite Stubbs’ worldwide appeal and prominence in most major museums of the world, there has never before been an important exhibition devoted to his engraved work, which made up a large part of his prolific output. In arranging this exhibition the British Sporting Art Trust seeks to address this and the exhibits on display will reveal Stubbs’ remarkable talent as an engraver”.

Although he was primarily known as a horse painter, Stubbs reveals a wider, more diverse and fascinating side to his oeuvre through his engravings. The exhibition includes, for example, some of his earliest known engraved work on the subject of Midwifery. Etched in 1751 the vivid images show the development of a child in the womb and reveal Stubbs’s remarkable technical accomplishment, particularly as he was essentially a self-taught engraver. His well-known study of The Anatomy of the Horse followed some 15 years later and the examples of his engravings of anatomical dissections are equally revelatory.

From 1765 Stubbs produced the main body of his work upon which his reputation as an innovative and unique artist rests. Many of the engravings echo the themes of his paintings - sportsmen out shooting with dogs, detailed studies of game dogs and conversation-piece group portraits of country-folk going about their everyday activities (eg Haymakers, Reapers, Gamekeepers and Labourers). Unusually, during this period, Stubbs did only a very few engravings of portraits of well-known racehorses, with the single exception of Gimcrack in 1766. However later in his career Stubbs’ engraved work returned on a grand scale to the theme of the racehorse, resulting in magnificent engravings of famous thoroughbreds. Two such works are Mambrino and Dungannon from a group of engravings known as Review of the Turf published by Stubbs in collaboration with his son George Townly Stubbs in 1794.

Among the highlights of the exhibition is Stubbs’s acclaimed engraving of A Tigress, an example of one of the many works which show Stubbs’ ability to capture and portray the passion and emotion within animals. Such works ensured his fame as an artistic giant. A contemporary critic on viewing A Tigress wrote: “without exception it was the finest mezzotint ever engraved” and the artist Fuseli recorded that “for grandeur this tiger has never been equalled”.

The exhibition at Bonhams’ New Bond Street galleries, which is open to the public free of charge, will include more than 100 engravings, kindly loaned by The British Museum, the British Sporting Art Trust’s own collection, The Yale Center for British Art and important private collectors in America and the U.K. The Engraved Work of George Stubbs will show Stubbs’s engraved works for what they should be - as an art form important in its own right confirming the mastery of Stubbs’s artistic legacy.

For more details visit the Bonhams web site.