Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse
Boodles is proud to be sponsoring Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse as part of its ongoing partnership with the National Gallery.
Detail from George Stubbs, Dungannon with a Lamb, 1793 © Private collection. Photo: The National Gallery, London
Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse
The sponsorship is a natural progression from Boodles’ partnership with the National Gallery in 2024, during which we produced a high jewellery collection and created a garden, NG200, inspired by the masterpieces within the gallery. Fittingly, this year also marks the Year of the Horse, making it a perfect moment to celebrate Stubbs’ extraordinary equine portraits and Boodles’ own connection to horses, from our equestrian-inspired jewellery to our sponsorship of the Boodles Cheltenham Gold Cup.
George Stubbs Dungannon with a Lamb, 1793 Oil on canvas, 99 x 126cm
Private collection © Private collection. Photo: The National Gallery, London
Scrub
The exhibition offers the opportunity to step into the world of George Stubbs, the
visionary British painter. Visitors can marvel at his monumental portrait of a rearing racehorse, Scrub. In the 1750s, Stubbs spent 18 months in a remote barn in Horkstow, Lincolnshire.
Hidden away, he devoted his time to studying and drawing the anatomy of horses. What resulted was the most thorough study of the subject for over a hundred years. Incredibly, Stubbs’s pictures of horses are still among the most accurate ever painted, while also capturing their unique characters. In the exhibition, you’ll meet one of these horses: Scrub. Painted by Stubbs around
1762, we see Scrub rearing against a landscape backdrop - notably without a rider.
George Stubbs,
Scrub, a bay horse belonging to the Marquess of Rockingham, about 1762
Oil on canvas, 268 x 244.5 cm
Private Collection
© Private Collection. Photo: The National Gallery, London
Mambrino
George Stubbs, Mambrino, 1779–93 Oil on canvas, 87.6 x 116.8 cm Private collection © Private collection. Photo: The National Gallery, London
In a nearby room is another monumental horse painting by Stubbs, this time of Scrub’s now-famous contemporary, Whistlejacket. Painted around the same time, these would be two of the first life-size portraits to depict horses without a human presence in British history. The paintings changed the spirit of equine art forever.
Lucky
Boodles’ equine-inspired collection, Lucky, is designed to showcase the majestic nature of racehorses. Boodles’ designers combined the spirit and force of horses with a quintessentially Boodles style to create something extraordinary.
The collection offers the opportunity to take the exhilaration and excitement of a day at the races wherever the wearer goes. Stylised horseshoes in diamond-set platinum effortlessly convey the energy of horses in motion; in a pendant and wraparound earrings, droplets of water fly from the hoof, encapsulated in sculptural form.
The exhibition opens on 12th March and runs through to 31st May 2026 in the National Gallery.
All images are courtesy of the National Gallery.