Far more than a fine horse portraitist, George Stubbs was a painter and a printmaker of the highest importance, on a par with his great contemporaries, Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough. An artist-scientist who emulated Leonardo da Vinci, Stubbs tirelessly explored the natural world, and new ways of representing it.
Born the son of a Liverpool tradesman, Stubbs was self-taught and at first struggled in obscurity as a northern provincial painter. Robin Blake’s book uncovers Stubbs’s origins and some of the secrets of his youth: sympathy with the Jacobite rebels and Catholicism; and a previously undocumented wife and family in York.
A ‘niece’, Mary, became his mistress and lifelong companion, working alongside him as he dissected the carcasses of horses. In 1776 he published these investigations as The Anatomy of the Horse, which was his breakthrough, leading to commissions from the most powerful men in Georgian Britain. By tracing the network of patronage and friendship through which George Stubbs operated, Robin Blake reveals the remarkable succession of animals, people and ideas which inspired him.
Stubbs emerges as a man of huge energy and complex sensibility whose artistry was informed by science, politics, literature, classical art and – above all – nature itself.
Robin Blake is a full-time writer whose publications include Anthony van Dyck: A Life, 1599-1641 (1999) and Essential Modern Art (2001).
Animals, people and places
in the life of George Stubbs, 1724–1806
Chatto & Windus
LONDON
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First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 2005
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ISBN 0 7011 7305 X
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Robin Blake
List of Illustrations
Chronology
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Family Tree
I MINORITY
1. Liverpool: a London in Miniature
2. The Skin Trade
3. Honest John
4. Drawing Up
5. Winstanley of Warrington
6. Knowsley
7. Self Help
II OBSCURITY
8. Captain Blackburne
9. The Tyrant of Leeds
10. Yorkshire Art
11. York and War
12. Family, Religion and Politics
13. Vile Renown
14. In the Schoolroom
15. Burton the Jacobite
16. Dr Slop
17. Dame Nature
18. Hull
19. Grand Tour
20. Nature and Art
21. In Excelsis
22. His Mother’s House
23. Inside the Horse
24. Mary Spencer
25. Scalpel and Pencil
26. A Lincolnshire Van Dyck
III CELEBRITY
27. Wonderful Immensity
28. Ridicule and Applause
29. Goodwood
30. The Grosvenor Hunt
31. Rockingham
32. Political Paint
33. Somerset Street
34. Stud and Groom
35. Horses in Training
36. Flemish Stubbs
37. Game Law
38. This My Performance
39. Myth Making
40. Eclipse
41. Conversation
42. Troubles at the Society
43. Enamel
44. The Wide Creation
45. Printmaker
46. Wax and Wedgwood
47. The Academy
48. Seasons
IV LONGEVITY
49. Return to the Fray
50. A Fable
51. Cosway and the Prince
52. The Turf Gallery
53. Comparative Anatomy
54. Hambletonian
55. Old Friends
56. Last Days
57. The Lost Legacy
Afterword
Picture Section
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Copyright
In memory of my father
JOHN BERCHMANS BLAKE
1910–1999
By the same author
Anthony van Dyck: a Life, 1599–1641
Essential Modern Art
(Works are by George Stubbs, and in oil on canvas, unless otherwise indicated)
COLOUR PLATES
1. Portrait of the Artist, enamel on biscuitware, 1781 (© National Portrait Gallery, London).
2. John Blackburne of Orford Hall, Hamlet Winstanley, 1743 (Warrington Museum).
3. George Fothergill, 1746 (Ferens Art Gallery, Hull/Bridgeman Art Library).
4. James Stanley, 1755 (Merseyside Museums/Bridgeman Art Library).
5. Erasmus Darwin, enamel on biscuit earthenware, 1783 (By courtesy of the Wedgwood Museum Trust, Staffordshire, England).
6. The Charlton Hunt, 1759 (Trustees of the Goodwood Collection, Goodwood House, Sussex).
7. The Grosvenor Hunt, 1762 (Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library).
8. Whistlejacket, c. 1762 (National Gallery, London/Bridgeman Art Library).
9. Gimcrack with Jockey and Groom on Newmarket Heath, 1765 (Private Collection).
10. Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians, 1765 (City of Manchester Art Galleries/Bridgeman Art Library).
11. The Zebra, 1763 (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library).
12. The Lincolnshire Ox, 1790 (Merseyside Museums/Bridgeman Art Library).
13. The Prince of Wales’s Phaeton, 1794 (The Royal Collection © 2005, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II).
14. Haymakers, oil on panel, 1785 (Tate Britain).
15. Reapers, oil on panel, 1785 (Tate Britain).
16. Hambletonian Rubbing Down, 1800 (The National Trust, Northern Ireland).
17. Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon’s Gamekeeper with a Dying Doe and a Hound, 1800 (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library).
BLACK AND WHITE PLATES
1. Portrait of a Young Man, William Caddick (Merseyside Museums/Bridgeman Art Library).
2. Portrait of the Artist at his Easel, Hamlet Winstanley (Merseyside Museums/Bridgeman Art Library).
3. The Blackburne Family, photograph of a lost painting by Hamlet Winstanley (British Library).
4. Judge Richard Wilson, Benjamin Wilson (Temple Newsam House/Bridgeman Art Library).
5–7. Three plates illustrating foetal presentations and obstetrical instruments, from John Burton’s An Essay Towards a Complete System of Midwifry, Theoretical and Practical, etc., 1751 (British Library).
8. Foetus in Profile, Jan van Riemsdyck from William Smellie’s A Sett of Anatomical Tables with Explanations . . . of the Practice of Midwifery, 1754 (Wellcome Institute Library).
9. Sir Henry and Lady Nelthorpe, 1746 (Private Collection).
10. Sir John Nelthorpe as a Boy, 1755 (Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library).
11. Flayed Horse, bronze (The Torrie Collection, © The University of Edinburgh).
12. Horse, partially dissected, anterior view, graphite on paper (Royal Academy of Arts).
13. Horse, partially dissected, anterior view, 8th Anatomical Table from Stubbs, George, The Anatomy of the Horse, 1766 (Private Collection).
14. A Kill at Ashdown Park, James Seymour, 1743 (Tate Britain).
15. Three stallions with Simon Cobb, 1762 (Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library).
16. Scrub with John Singleton up, 1762 (Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library).
17. Jenison Shafto’s Snap with Groom, 1760 (Private Collection).
18. Horse Attacked by a Lion, 1762 (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library).
19. Jacobite Medal, Otto Hamerani, bronze, 1721 (© copyright Trustees of the British Museum).
20. Lion Attacking a Horse, Peter Scheemakers, Portland stone, 1742 (Rousham House/Bridgeman Art Library).
21. Mares & Foals Beneath Large Oak Trees, 1773 (executors of Anne, Duchess of Westminster/Bridgeman Art Library).
22. Hound Coursing a Stag, 1762–63 (Philadelphia Museum of Art/Bridgeman Art Library).
23. Shooting, William Woollett after Stubbs, engraving, 1769–71. (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library).
24. Labourers, enamel on biscuitware, 1781 (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library).
25. Eclipse, Thomas Burke after Stubbs, mezzotint, 1772 (Private Collection).
26. The Saltonstall Family, 1769 (Private Collection).
27. The Milbanke and Melbourne Families, 1770 (National Gallery/Bridgeman Art Library).
28. Photographs showing stages in the restoration of John and Sophie Musters Riding at Colwick Hall [cover picture].
29. Mother and Child, enamel on copper, 1772 (Tate Britain).
30. The Fall of Phaeton, solid blue jasper, white relief, c. 1780 (Merseyside Museums/Bridgeman Art Library).
31. Bulls Fighting, oil on panel, 1786 (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library).
32. The Farmer’s Wife and the Raven, oil on millboard, 1786 (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library).
33. Soldiers of the 10th Dragoons, 1794 (The Royal Collection © 2005, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.)
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
1 Phaethon, mezzotint by Benjamin Green after George Stubbs, c. 1765–6 (Private Collection).
2 A Plan of Liverpool with the Docks, 1766 (British Library).
3 Liverpool from the Bowling Green (detail), Michael Angelo Rooker, watercolour, 1769 (Merseyside Museums).
4 A currier shaving a hide.
5 The Stubbs family’s former house and premises, watercolour, 1844 (Liverpool City Library).
6 Amor Scientiarum, Hamlet Winstanley, etching ‘after Van Dyck’ (British Library).
7 Orford Hall, the seat of John Blackburne (British Library).
8 York County Hospital, 1745.
9 Illustration by William Hogarth from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (British Library).
10 Palazzo Muti, Rome, in the 1750s.
11 Domenico Angelo’s Fencing Academy, Thomas Rowlandson, acquatint, 1791 (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library).
12 A Horse Race, by Rowlandson, 1785 (Private Collection).
13 Gamekeepers, Robert Laurie and Richard Earlom, after George Stubbs, 1790 (Private Collection).
14 Human Skeleton with Rhinoceros, Charles Grignion after Jan Wandelaar, 1749 (Wellcome Institute Library).
15 The Betting Post, Thomas Rowlandson, watercolour, c. 1789 (Victoria and Albert Museum).
16 The Macaroni Painter, or Billy Dimple, Richard Earlom, engraving after Richard Dighton, 1772 (Private Collection).
17 The Duke of Richmond’s First Bull Moose, 1770 (Hunterian Art Gallery).
18 Horses Fighting, George Townley Stubbs after George Stubbs, mezzotint, 1788 (Private Collection).
19 a. Fowl skeleton, lateral view, graphite (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library); b. Human skeleton, anterior view, in crouching posture, graphite (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library); c. Tiger skeleton, lateral view, graphite (Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library).
20 Subscription ticket for the print after Stubbs’s painting of the Lincolnshire Ox, 1790 (Merseyside Museums).
21 The Farmer’s Wife and the Raven, John Wootton, woodcut illustration from John Gay’s Fables, 1731 (British Library).
22 His Highness in Fitz, a caricature attributed to G. T. Stubbs, 1786 (Private collection).
23 Baronet with Sam Chifney up, G. T. Stubbs, mezzotint after George Stubbs (Private Collection).
24 Terror, or Fright, from ‘Views of the Passions’, George Townley Stubbs, stipple engraving after wax model by George Stubbs, 1800 (Wellcome Institute Library).
25 George Stubbs, Ozias Humphry, pastel, 1794 (Walker AG).
GS = George Stubbs; GTS = George Townley Stubbs; PoW = the Prince of Wales; SoA = the Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain; RA = the Royal Academy of Arts; b. = born; m. = married; d. = died
I visited scores of galleries, libraries, archives and private homes in search of Stubbs, wrote hundreds of letters and e-mails, and had countless conversations about him. I am grateful to all those people who freely gave me help and advice.
Of professional archivists and curators, I received help from David Stoker and others at the City Library in Liverpool, as well as staff at the Walker Art Gallery (especially Audrey Hall), the Lancashire and Cheshire Record Offices, the Sheffield Archives, the Wigan History Shop (especially Christine Watts), Warrington Archivist Hilary Chambers, Marjorie Whaler of the Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, Frank Salmon of the Brinsley Ford Archive (Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art), Marijke Booth of Christie’s Archive, Alison Brech and Christopher Webb of the Borthwick Institute and Sister Gregory Kirkus, archivist of the Bar Convent, York. I would also mention the Jockey Club, Val Loggie of the Erasmus Darwin Foundation, Tori Reeve, curator of Darwin’s home Down House, Joan Appleton of Warrington, John Goodchild of Wakefield and H. F. Constantine, who was the first to look for Stubbs in the Rockingham papers at Sheffield. In America, the staff at the Yale Center for British Arts, Cathy Schenk, of the Keeneland Library, and Wendy Gottlieb of the Kimbell Art Museum, have also given assistance.
Historians and art historians who lent me their expertise over specific questions include David Alexander, Alex Kidson, John Ingamells, Margot Finn, Joanna Innes, R. F. Foster, Paul Langford, R. G. Wilson, Liza Picard, Andrew Loukes (Manchester City Galleries), Dom Alberic Stacpoole OSB (Ampleforth Abbey) and Abbot Geoffrey Scott, OSB (Douai Abbey).
For showing me works by Stubbs not in public collections I thank Lord Petre, Christopher and Lady Juliet Tadgell, and Alistair Macdonald-Buchanan.
Genealogists Jane Stubbs and Richard Fothergill, with their voluminous knowledge of the families to which they belong, have been exceptionally helpful. I also benefited from information supplied by Hazel Lovatt, Gill Briscoe (Pontefract and District Family History Society) and Alan Laundon (of Horkstow) and also, consistently, by the professional and voluntary staff at the Genealogical Society, London.
Library work is at the heart of any biographical research, and staff at the London Library, British Library, Bodleian, Cambridge University Library, National Art Library, Natural History Museum Library, Sheffield University Library, Nottingham University Library, Wellcome Institute Library (especially Katja Robinson) and York Minster Library have all, at different times, gone out of their way to assist. The news that York Minster Library was threatened with closure, and its unique collections with dispersal, came at around the time I was working there. I am delighted that this threat has now been lifted.
Many others have offered references, books, advice and encouragement, including Andrew Blake, Tony Proctor, Janet Waugh, Chris and Christa Mee, Mark Roberts, Heather Mackay Roberts, Honor Sharman, Judith Flanders, Beth McKillop, Jane Merer and Helen McIntyre. Meanwhile Penelope Hoare, Poppy Hampson, Ilsa Yardley, and the staff at Chatto & Windus, have been unfailingly professional and supportive, as have my literary agents Gill Coleridge and Lucy Luck. Malcolm Warner of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, came forward with a generous commission for three essays in the catalogue of his exhibition Stubbs and the Horse (Fort Worth, Baltimore and London 2004–5). Malcolm has also been a good friend and steady sounding board for ideas.
Above all I pay tribute to the scholar and writer Judy Egerton, author of the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of Stubbs. Without her friendship and her wise (often sceptical) counsel this book would have been an altogether poorer thing.
Finally, infinite thanks are owed to my family: Fanny, Matt, Nick and Spike.
Note on Text
Chapter epigraphs, unless otherwise attributed, are from Ozias Humphry’s Memoir of George Stubbs. Parts of chapters 31–35 and 51–54 are adapted from passages in three essays by me in Warner, 2004.
Drawings and paintings of animals – with or without their human associates – are among the most vigorous and interesting works in all British art. The genre was originally a seventeenth-century Netherlandish import, but by the time its supreme exponent, George Stubbs, was born in 1724, the form had taken root in England. It quickly became a national speciality, like the closely related fashion for paintings of country houses and estates. Such works were commissioned by sporting landowners, who were often prepared to pay handsome prices. In the generation before Stubbs, John Wootton, the London-based sporting painter, was regarded as the highest-paid artist in the country, though not a particularly creditable one: ‘a cunning fellow, and has made great interest among the nobility but he is the dirtiest artist I ever saw’.1
Animal painters like Wootton were expected to provide portraits of racehorses, hunters and hounds, and from time to time to produce larger-scale sporting scenes set in a landscape. Later, specifically after 1760, and in large part through Stubbs’s practice and influence, the scope widened to take in scientific and agricultural illustration, and conversation pieces of families posing with their animals. By this time British animal art had drifted far from its Netherlandish origins and was equally distinct from the work of contemporary animaliers in other European countries. It had, in fact, become a highly distinctive, very visible and truly national art.
In the hands of Stubbs this work reached an unequalled pitch of greatness, and it brought him huge success. The fee he could attract for a single commission was equivalent to tens of thousands of pounds in today’s money, and his pictures graced the walls of neoclassical mansions in virtually every English county.
The fame he enjoyed in his lifetime surprised me as I began work on this biography. I knew Stubbs had been the cynosure of eighteenth-century horse and dog painters, equally beloved by hard-riding landed sportsmen and rich ladies with their pampered spitzes and spaniels. But the art world in his time viewed animal painting as a low and degraded form. The contempt for Wootton, evident in the remark quoted above, was typical, and it was a prejudice that hardened as the Royal Academy of Arts, with its high-minded, class-conscious view of painting, gained ascendancy in the second half of the century.
Stubbs himself always disliked the Academy, and the sentiment was mutual. After his death, academic art erased him from its collective memory so thoroughly that, only two generations later, a rare Victorian admirer of his would write, ‘the name of this eminent artist is familiar to few people at the present day. In some great mansion, the housekeeper will pronounce it and a visitor will catch that unknown monosyllable in the midst of her drawling roll, may glance with admiration at the big picture overhead, but will probably again forget.’2 This amnesia was profound and long-lasting. For a hundred years and more none of the leading writers on British art, from John Ruskin to Herbert Read, ever mentioned George Stubbs.
His name has recovered all and more of the lustre it once enjoyed but, in the interval, the biographical earth has been left charred and almost barren. Except for one or two isolated documents in his hand, mostly brief and transactional, the documentary sources that a student of his life would hope to consult, the seeds of biography, have been almost entirely lost, consumed or destroyed. Of personal letters, journals, sketchbooks, studio accounts and appointment books, no trace of any kind has been discovered.
These gaps in the record might have been less gaping had the marginalisation of Stubbs not begun before his death. Just two published obituaries followed his funeral in 1806 – a few paragraphs in The Gentleman’s Magazine, and a rather more substantial three-part appreciation carried by the specialist Sporting Magazine. None of the artist’s family did anything to halt the slide in his posthumous reputation, let alone to establish a cult of his name. There is not even a memorial to him in the London church where he was a parishioner and vestryman, or in the graveyard where his bodily remains were laid.
Yet one remarkable, and in some ways remarkably detailed, source for Stubbs’s life has survived. It is a manuscript memoir written, or rather scribbled, by his admirer, the younger artist Ozias Humphry, an obsessive accumulator of papers and documents about his own career in particular, and the London art scene in general. Without Humphry, it is unlikely a biography at book length would be feasible at all.
The memoir consists of a manuscript notebook bound in half-calf. On its first (originally blank) page is pasted the obituary of Stubbs scissored from the pages of The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1806. After some brief notes on the career of Francis Cotes, a minor eighteenth-century artist with no particular connection to Stubbs, another page is left blank before the Stubbs memoir begins.
These particulars of the life of Mr Stubbs were given to the author of this Memoir by himself and committed from his own relation, – but are much too diffusive and unimportant for the public eye.
Mr Stubbs’s merits, however, are so great, his long continued diligence and perseverance, so uncommon, that the author was much amused in hearing the recital and committing it.3
These opening words affirm something important: the memoir is, in effect, an authorised life, containing the essence of what Stubbs himself considered to be the important facts of his career.
Humphry covered sixty-four right-hand pages in his own hand with a more or less continuous and chronological narrative. It is a hurriedly written screed, giving the impression of something like a dictation. When the continuous narrative comes to an end it is carefully dated below the last line ‘February 3rd 1797’, which means that the conversations on which it was based occurred in Stubbs’s seventy-third year. On the left-hand pages of the notebook, later additions and glosses have been inserted, keyed to symbols marked in the continuous text. Some of these notes are in a different hand, that of Mary Spencer, who was George Stubbs’s companion. She lived with him for half a century and was the mother of his natural child, Richard Spencer Stubbs. Mary did not add her observations until after Stubbs had died, doing so either at the request of Humphry himself, or of Humphry’s illegitimate son William Upcott, who was probably the Gentleman’s Magazine obituarist. As well as these scrappy additions, two fair-copy transcripts of the memoir have survived, made by Upcott, who in 1810 inherited his father’s papers. In occasionally significant but not fundamental ways, they seek to ‘improve’ on the original in phrasing and choice of words, as if to prepare it for publication.4
The outstanding importance of this text is easily appreciated, but it is also in a number of ways a flawed and problematic source. There is no reason to doubt its general sincerity, or the overall accuracy of what it says. Many details can be checked against the Sporting Magazine articles published in 1807 and 1808, the first two of which are signed ‘T.N.’ and the third, simply, ‘N’. The obituarist has not been identified and, though he may have had access to the Humphry manuscript, he provides a fair amount of additional information, suggesting he had known Stubbs personally or at least, as he claims, had consulted relations and friends. A variety of other mostly fragmentary sources help to confirm and, with luck, to amplify the story: parish and estate records, dated pictures and prints, and odd references to Stubbs in the letters, journals and memoirs of his contemporaries.
These secondary authorities tend to confirm that the notebook charts the significant peaks of Stubbs’s career with reasonable accuracy. The trouble is that it entirely ignores any troughs: the failures, the times of hardship, the personal crises. Indeed, Humphry tells us hardly anything about his subject’s inner life. Mary Spencer’s annotations are fractionally more revealing, but they are jottings, whose limitations are evident in this reverential synopsis of Stubbs’s character:
[He was] a rare example in the annals of his professional history: in his particular branch of art unequated; in his private life exemplary for honour, honesty, integrity and temperance, his genial beverage being water and his food simple, professed of a firm and manly spirit, met with a heart overflowing with the milk of human kindness, beloved by his friends, feared by his enemies and esteemed by all who knew him.5
Through Mary’s eyes, this was a man of strict rectitude and thorough worth – a secular saint.
At times, Stubbs liked to portray himself in the same light. In 1781 he made a self-portrait at the age of fifty-seven for his friends the Thorold family, using the technique he perfected of enamel painting ‘in large’. This shows him just past the peak of his artistic success and in ascetic, almost monk-like guise.
But, as my research into Stubbs unfolded, new perspectives opened up. I came across numbers of hidden or anomalous facts about his life and career, not all of them easy to square with the hagiographies of Humphry, Mary Spencer, Upcott and ‘T.N.’. There were, for instance, a wife and children who had been comprehensively wiped from the record, and a whole circle of friends whose political subversiveness goes unmentioned. And instead of the unshakeable integrity of a ‘firm and manly spirit’ I found suggestions of apostasy or tergiversation on issues that might fairly be regarded as matters of principle. Most significantly of all, perhaps, I came to see the account Stubbs had given to Humphry of his own aesthetic, the principles underlying his art, as misleading in ways that must have been deliberate.
In the absence of documents giving access to George Stubbs’s mind, little of the psychological background to this is available for analysis. My aim in this book has therefore been to identify the external influences on him, the people, places, animals and ideas that he responded to in the course of a very long life. At times it is impossible to do more than sketch how his work and his life’s experience cohere, and elsewhere a degree of guesswork is inevitable. ‘Speculation’ may be a word of scorn in art history’s lexicon, but Stubbs is one of the greatest of British artists, who demands and deserves to have what light there is cast upon him, however shaded or refracted the proximate sources may be.
The well-known Painter of Horses and other Animals, was born at Liverpool, in Lancashire, on 24 August 1724.
THE HOUSE IN which George Stubbs entered the world stood on Dale Street, which was the longest and most important thoroughfare in Liverpool, and formed the spine of its commercial life. The seaport had been slow to fulfil the expectations of its thirteenth-century founder King John. Clinging to the north shore of the Mersey estuary, clustered around a small creek, the Pool, it was isolated from the major trunk roads and had survived quietly on fishing and the coastal trade, and a certain amount of sleepy traffic to Ireland. But by the close of the seventeenth century the pulse of life was quickening. The old airborne scents of bladderwrack, herring, tar, hempen rope, wet canvas and sawn timbers now mingled at the dockside with more exotic smells – cinnamon and coffee, tea and tobacco leaf, wine, brandy, molasses, sperm oil, raw cotton. The triangular ‘Guinea trade’ – the exchange of shiny Lancashire ironwork for black African slaves, and those slaves for golden American sugar and tobacco – had begun to work its sinister alchemy. It would increase exponentially over the next century, and bring Liverpool undreamed-of wealth.
The port’s much more successful rival had always been Chester, with its excellent road links to the Midlands and the South. But the balance of advantage had shifted as Chester’s access to the ocean, the River Dee, became increasingly silted up. At the same time maritime warfare with the Dutch, Spanish or French had handed Liverpool an advantage over the great southern and eastern ports of the realm. Liverpool’s western station meant that her ships enjoyed better odds in the game of survival against marauding men-of-war.
And Liverpool was modernising. A survey of the port around 1700 had outlined the problem. ‘’Tis bad riding afloat before the town by reason of the strong tides that run here; therefore ships that ride afloat, ride up the Slyne [the Pool] where there is less tide.’ But, like the Dee, the Pool was becoming silted and this prompted the Corporation to take an enlightened and far-reaching decision. They engaged the engineer Thomas Steers to form a harbour, a rectangular deep-water enclosure at the mouth of the Pool, surrounded by warehouses and with a sea gate giving on to the Mersey. Opened in 1715, Steers’s construction was the country’s first enclosed dock for civilian use outside London.1
Liverpool’s main exports were Cheshire salt and cheese, and Lancashire coals and metal manufactures. A ruinous road network had always made it difficult for these to reach the dockside but, once the new dock was built, private investors made navigations of the River Weaver (as far as the salt towns of Nantwich and Winsford) and the Mersey (as far as Warrington and later Manchester), building locks and digging cuts to allow lighters and barges to penetrate deep inland.
The enclosed dock, and the navigations, were an extraordinary success and the town’s clear commitment to modernisation attracted ever more trade, wealth and development. As early as 1696 the traveller Celia Fiennes had found Liverpool ‘a very rich trading town, the houses of brick and stone built high and even … there are an abundance of persons you see very well dressed, and of good fashion, the streets are fair and long, it’s London in miniature as ever I saw anything’. By the 1720s Daniel Defoe could warble ecstatically that ‘there is no town in England, London excepted, that can equal Liverpool for the fineness of the streets and the Beauty of the Buildings; many of the houses are of Free Stone and compleatly finished; and all the rest (of the new part I mean) of Brick, as handsomely built as London itself’.2
But a medieval infrastructure was bending under the weight of the new, money-making superstructure. Migrants were being sucked in at a dizzying rate. In the century after the Civil War the population of Liverpool trebled and trebled again to reach 18,500 by the mid eighteenth century. The Vestry – the assembly which controlled parish affairs – struggled in these new circumstances to carry out their duties, of which by far the most onerous was the alleviation of poverty. The ley, a levy on householders to pay for poor relief, increased almost yearly. In 1681 the total collected for distribution was £40; four decades later it was £1000. In the same period the Poor Law overseers, appointed by the Vestry, increased from two to four, and then eight, by which time the days when individual grants could be listed in the minute book (‘a waistcoat and drawers for Garner’s lad, 1s.’) were over. In 1732, after an experiment in privatisation – ‘farming the poor’ – had gone disastrously wrong, the newly fashionable (and, by the poor, greatly detested) alternative of a workhouse was built.3
One of the poor grants earlier approved by the Liverpool Vestry was in October 1694, ‘for [the burial of] a child of Robert Stubbs, 3s.4d.’ The deceased was a Liverpool-born six-year-old boy. His father Robert was a cobbler, otherwise styled cordwainer, who also apparently kept an inn. Robert’s name first appears in the Liverpool records in 1683 when the Corporation paid ‘on the King’s Return from Holland, to Robt Stubbs for Ale – 12s.’, which suggests that the innkeeper had friends in the city government. A year later, the register of St Nicholas church identified Robert’s other occupation: ‘5th of June, baptised, Doraty, daughter of Robert Stubbs, shoemaker’. Despite his useful contacts in the Corporation (in 1692 he again supplied ale, this time worth 17s., ‘for the Soldiers’) the course of Robert Stubbs’s life was clearly a bumpy one, but he continued to keep his Dale Street inn. It was no hole-in-the-wall taproom, but a respectable post house where Nicholas Blundell, diarist and Squire of Little Crosby, drank in 1708, and again in 1712, in the company of his lawyer and friend, John Plumbe, and ‘Nicholson a writing master, Mr Taylor of Leverpoole the Watchmaker &c.’. Two years later, when Robert Stubbs died, the parish register gave him the rank of Postmaster. So the former recipient of Poor Relief had ended his life a man of some account in the town.4
A considerable currier and Leather dresser.
THE STUBBS FAMILY was to proliferate in Liverpool in the first half of the eighteenth century, but its immediate origins were twenty miles to the east in the town of Warrington, which stood on the border with Cheshire and at the lowest practicable crossing point over the River Mersey. Here, in the reign of Elizabeth I, Henry and Joyce Stubbs had established a currying business – the production of refined leather – on Bridge Street.1 Their descendants became Warrington’s chief curriers with, like Robert Stubbs later in Liverpool, a useful sideline in innkeeping and brewing.2
Young Robert seems to have joined a Stubbs migration from Warrington to Liverpool for, at about the same time as he appeared in the rapidly growing seaport, another leather worker, ‘Richard Stubbs, currier’, also arrived. This hopeful young man had married Elizabeth Ransom at Warrington in 1679, and a year or so later the couple travelled with their baby son, John, westward along the rutted mule track which passed for the Warrington-to-Liverpool road. Richard was probably Robert’s elder brother; he was certainly the grandfather of George Stubbs the painter.3
Leaving Warrington either because of friction with his Bridge Street relations – the ‘Ireland’ Stubbses – or in a drive to diversify the currying business, Liverpool now became his home, although he and Elizabeth did not sever all connections with Warrington (at least one of his children, Ireland, was baptised there in May 1685). The family’s first known address is Castle Street, at the very centre of town and close to a crumbling old Norman keep. Here Richard and Elizabeth raised a family so large that, by the time their final child was born, in 1707, their progeny were spread out across more than a quarter of a century. The sons, or those who survived childhood, all became curriers.4
There are no surviving Stubbs wills from which to judge the success of the enterprise in this period, but it seems to have been no better than modest. By 1708 Richard and Elizabeth had moved to Dale Street where they crammed into a rented four- or five-room house. Rated to pay a ley of just 1s.4d, the value of the property was at the bottom of the scale for householders in Dale Street.5 Richard Stubbs, as a merchant in an important trade, would have been expected to serve as an alderman, or take some other Corporation or parish post. He never did so, even though holding office would have opened many lucrative business opportunities. The underlying reason may have been political. In the early part of 1696, when the government was expecting a landing by armies in support of the ousted Stuart king, James II, 500 Liverpool citizens joined together to form an association affirming their absolute loyalty to the Dutchman, William III of Orange. Richard Stubbs (unlike Robert the shoemaker) refrained from signing, a strong signal that he was a nonjuror, whose Jacobite sympathies prevented him from swearing loyal oaths to anyone other than King James. Nonjuring was a stance men took on principle, often against their own economic interests, for it automatically disqualified them from almost all public offices.6
George Stubbs the painter has sometimes been described as having grown up, as the son of a currier, surrounded by flayed animal corpses, and that this stirred his interest in animal anatomy.7 This is based on a misconception. Currying was not tanning, and did not involve the slaughter and skinning of animals. Instead, the currier bought his hides already tanned. The town tannery occupied a ‘brown-field’ site north of Dale Street and east of Cheapside, near which stood two windmills, a pot works and the town ducking stool. The tanned hides were marketed by the tanners at the Leather Hall, Liverpool’s leather exchange which, since the formerly royal castle had passed to the Corporation in 1718, had been housed on Derby Square, in the cellar below the castle’s great tower. Here local leather was sold alongside specialist imports straight from the quays – shagreen, morocco or cordovan. A high proportion of the customers were shoemakers, glovers, saddlers and curriers.8
Leather was a ubiquitous material and one of the great industries of Europe. It has been calculated that in England, in 1770, leather ‘contributed over 23 per cent of total value added in industry, only a little less than the 30 per cent contributed by wool’. For the entire century and beyond, it was the durable material of choice for the manufacture of bags, boxes, book covers, buckets, bottles, breeches, buttons, boots and belts; also for shoes, gloves, aprons, hoods, caps, jerkins, chaps, stays, laces, purses, upholstery, harness, whips, saddles, straps, collars, the suspension of carriages and the surface of writing tables.9
The currier’s niche in this market was specialised, but secure. He produced dressed or luxury leather, that is, sheets of thin, smooth, pliable material, grained, tooled and coloured as necessary, for making the softest gloves and finest court shoes, covering the smartest carriages and surfacing the most beautiful desks. These sheets were created by a process analogous to planing wood. The tanned hide, having been thoroughly soaked in water and scoured, was shaved down, using a distinctively designed currier’s knife, to the degree of thinness and delicacy needed. This was the central, repetitive activity of the currier’s shop, a highly skilled manual task that required sure hands, exquisitely sharp tools and plenty of mental concentration. The shaved leather pieces were then treated with oils and fats such as dubbin and tallow, to give them strength and pliability, and finished in different ways.
An account of the premises of a typical currier in the Victorian era – a period in which the currying process had hardly changed in 200 years – gives some idea of what the Stubbses’ Dale Street premises were like. At street level was the scouring house, with its soaking tubs and scouring slabs. On the floor above was the currying shop itself, a large, light and airy room, in the centre of which were set the ‘beams’, the flat working surfaces standing on four legs like angled butcher-blocks. On these the hides were laid to be shaved by the currier wielding his knife. Around the walls ‘a series of tables, the plane surfaces of which are made from mahogany or marble, are firmly fixed to the floor, near the windows, so that the workmen may have the full benefit of the light. At a short distance from each table, and behind the workman, is a wooden trestle, across which the currier throws each piece of leather after he has worked it on the table in any of the dressing operations.’ These operations included rounding, setting, finishing, stoning, starching, graining, waxing, top-sizing and embossing. In the courtyard at the back of the shop, under awnings, were racks for drying the leather.10
The currier’s office, entered from the street, was a busy space with customers coming and going during the day. The majority were craftsmen such as shoemakers, glovers, bookbinders and saddlers, but the currier also dealt directly with end consumers, in an era when luxury items were generally made to order from materials often picked out by the customers themselves. One of the town’s leading lawyers, John Plumbe, kept a pocket diary in which he recorded one such transaction, which surely refers to the Stubbs shop.
To: Mr Pain to pay the curriour for dressing a hide that Jo: Woods made my book & shoes of, 2s–0d.11
In the early 1720s the business, still headed by Richard, appears to have employed his sons John, William, Charles and Samuel. In time Richard’s grandsons, too, were apprenticed to the firm and one of those was George, the future painter.12
When Richard Stubbs died, in May 1722, he was over seventy, and had run the shop in Liverpool for four decades.13 Now John, at the age of forty-two, was in charge. He was still unmarried but, within eighteen months of his father’s death, he decided to take a wife, marrying Mary Laithwaite at the parish church of Childwall, three miles from Liverpool, on the morning of 10 November 1723. A degree of mystery has previously surrounded the bride, as she is not found in the obvious Liverpool family, that of William Laithwaite, watch-case maker of Chapel Street, Union Street and eventually Edmund Street, round the corner from the Stubbs home.14 Searches for a possible Mary among William’s ménage – in addition to his four children the watch-case maker seems to have been joined in Liverpool by several more Laithwaites from the Lancashire hinterland – remained for a long time disappointing. It is not until the 1723 Marriage Licence of John Stubbs and Mary Laithwaite is taken into account that the problem is solved. This, unlike the marriage register, describes ‘Mary Lathway’, in the Latin, as ‘vidiam’, widow. Stubbs’s mother was therefore a Laithwaite only by marriage.15
But if Mary’s maiden name was not Laithwaite, what was it? The marriage licence clearly describes her as being ‘of Leverpoole’ and the Liverpool parish registers provide a single candidate: Mary Patten who, on 26 November 1717, had married Roger Leatherd at St Nicholas church, Liverpool. Mary was at this date twenty, having been baptised on 23 June 1697.16 The Pattens were another family from Warrington and in their upper echelons a far more important one than the Stubbses. They were copper smelters with works at Bank Quay, and had extensive salt interests in the Cheshire ‘Wiches’. In Liverpool they were prosperous merchants, exporting their Cheshire salt and Warrington manufactures, while importing tobacco, sugar and other goods from the Guinea Trade, using their own ‘flats’ or barges along the river navigations, or else carts and packhorse trains, to move their merchandise along the inland trade routes. Handling the Liverpool end of their business was Hugh Patten, born in Warrington in 1675 but living now in a house in Old Hall Street. Assessed for the Liverpool Poor Rate at 11s.6d, his home was a substantial property.17
Mary, however, can only have been a very poor relation of Hugh. The precise origins of her father, John Patten, are unknown but by the 1700s he was of Dale Street, a neighbour of the Stubbses.18 He was a market gardener who worked two closes (land enclosed from the old town fields, which had originally been common) on a portion of Frostlake Fields which bordered Frog Lane. This land, rented from the Corporation, amounted to two acres and two roods (two and a half acres) and had a good situation near one of Liverpool’s main freshwater sources, the Fall Well. John Patten’s Dale Street dwelling-house, like Richard Stubbs’s, was not large, with five rooms in total, and he rented a warehouse nearby, also of no great size. Following his death, in February 1710, an inventory was drawn up of his house’s contents, showing the total value of his movable property to have been a little over £15.19
The inventory eloquently evokes the modesty of John Patten’s circumstances. The most valuable items were his ‘too milke Cowes, £4-0-0’. The collection of movable goods – sturdy cottage furniture, ironwork, pewter and brass, a clock and looking-glass, feather beds and other bedclothes, rugs and curtains, creamware and earthenware – amounted to £12.1s.10d. Almost as much, £10, was owed to the deceased ‘in debts sperate and desperate’, which suggests a generous or gullible nature. His ‘wearing apparel’ was valued at one pound, and there was hardly anything else:
Item, in odd implimentes, trash and trumpery … 1s.3d.
Mary, born in 1697, was the third child and second daughter of John Patten and his wife Elizabeth. Roger Laithwaite whom she married as her first husband, seven years after her father’s death, is harder to place than his bride, for his marriage at the church of St Nicholas is his only appearance in the Liverpool parish records. There were no children of the marriage and Roger was dead by 1723, since his widow became Mrs John Stubbs in that year at the age of twenty-eight. His death is not recorded, and it was quite possibly at sea.
From public records the historian can piece together the family’s names, their births, marriages and deaths, the state of their finances and other details, but these are only skeletal remains, from which the flesh has been stripped. The truth is that very little of substance is known about either of Stubbs’s parents. The one extended source, the Humphry manuscript, which might have captured their personalities for later generations, is almost silent on the subject of Mary. It is a little more informative about Stubbs’s father, the master currier, who appears as a man held in universal respect and affection. The word used to describe him is ‘considerable’ and yet, in the light of his complete absence from Corporation records, it cannot be said that John Stubbs made any greater mark on the Liverpool of his day than his father had in his. The sense is that John was driven not by worldly ambition and the pursuit of wealth, but by the prime virtues of hard work and integrity, setting no more store by ‘trash and trumpery’ than his late father-in-law John Patten. In this respect his painter son grew up to be very like him.
His father was a man of so much candour moderation and integrity that he was known amongst his neighbours and friends by the enviable appellation of ‘Honest John Stubbs’.
GEORGE STUBBS WAS born in August 1724, a time of storming weather. We know from Squire Blundell’s Great Diurnall that throughout that summer the country around Liverpool had suffered an almost daily battering from high winds, torrential rain, thunder and lightning. The hay was sodden, the corn was pitifully thin and difficult to harvest, apples were stripped unripe from the trees. Wagons hauled by teams of carthorses overturned, dumping their loads in the mud and breaking the draught animals’ legs. And just as horses and produce were destroyed on land, so ships were lost at sea. Men of Liverpool drowned, cargoes went down and prices went up. At the end of the following year, which was even wetter, Blundell wrote ‘the Rodes being so very bad in Summer people could not get home their provisions of coles, so were forced to fetch them on Hors-Backs … and a Hors load of coles was sold at Leverpoole for half a crown which formerly might have been bought there for seven pence’. On the more positive side, the increased moisture resulted in a fine harvest in August 1724 of Squire Blundell’s juiciest ever plums.1
Blundell’s estate was nine miles from Liverpool and his rides into town, which the diary chronicles once or twice a week, in all seasons and any weather, demonstrate the way in which urban Liverpool was interrelated not only with the sea on one side but with the surrounding countryside on the other. Blundell himself was beguiled by ships and cargoes. He often visited the port, viewing Steers’s dock while it was under construction, being entertained on board ship, buying casks of ‘whit port’. But this interest in the docks and ships was a by-product of his business in the town itself. He visited shops and offices, and socialised with professional men and tradespeople in the pubs and coffee houses, including Robert Stubbs’s place in Dale Street.
For all this, Blundell’s main economic preoccupations were not with the sea, or the town, but with marling his land, modernising his windmill, tending his plum trees and keeping on good terms with his tenants. The countryside can afford, in this way, to be more introspective or self-sufficient than the town. The whole point of an eighteenth-century town was that it was like a cell nucleus, drawing to itself nutrients (food, finance, people) from the cytoplasm of the lands and waters around it. Nicholas Blundell probably put more into the town of Liverpool than he got out of it.