Horse Devoured by Lion

George Stubbs’s Horse Devoured by a Lion shows a collapsed horse. Tate’s oil canvas, 69.2 × 103.5 cm (T02058), was possibly exhibited in 1763. ^[1]

The collapse at the centre

The horse fills the lower part of the group, with its body stretched across the rocky foreground. Its forelegs fold beneath it rather than reaching forward into a gallop. The neck takes the opposite direction: it rises sharply and bends back towards the lion. The head therefore remains high even though the body has fallen. Between those two movements, the animal seems caught in a tightening curve, unable to turn the power of its neck into an escape. ^[15]

Stubbs makes the pale mane unusually conspicuous against the darkness behind. It streams to the left while the muzzle points up and right, giving the turn of the head a visible sweep. The open mouth is another small bright interruption in the surrounding brown. Neither detail needs a human facial expression to register the strain: the position of the jaw and the reversal of the neck already make the action intelligible. ^[15]

The lion occupies the horse’s upper contour, its body pressing across the back rather than standing separately on the ground. Its darker head and mane sit below the raised horse’s head, where the two animals’ outlines almost close around one another. A forepaw reaches across the flank. The horse’s hindquarters remain low, with the pale tail curling out to the right. The attacker appears supported by the very body it is overpowering. ^[15]

This arrangement concentrates force into a compact knot. Looking from the horse’s bent forelegs up through its neck, the eye meets the lion and returns along the broad back towards the lowered hindquarters. There is no open direction within that circuit comparable to the long forward reach of a running horse. The painting’s violence comes partly from this compression of movement: the animals occupy ample landscape, yet the central body has very little room to move. ^[15]

Rock, water and distance

A heavy rock face rises immediately behind the struggle. Its dark middle tones make the horse’s warm coat and light mane legible, while branches and hanging foliage break the edge of the stone. A narrower upright crag stands towards the left. The rocks do more than provide an irregular silhouette: they give the animal group a weighty, almost enclosing back wall, against which the bent limbs and arched neck can be read clearly. ^[15]

The right side offers a striking change of space. Water runs beside the foreground shelf, and beyond it lighter cliffs and trees recede beneath an open sky. The distance is cooler and paler than the struggle. Looking away from the animals allows the eye to travel much farther into the picture, but the projecting ledge keeps bringing attention back to the exposed horse. Near enclosure and far openness coexist without making the scene feel spacious for its victim. ^[15]

Tate identifies Creswell Crags, on the Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border, as the landscape’s source, reworked around the imagined encounter. ^[1]

The water also provides a second kind of movement. Its pale broken passages lead across and behind the foreground rocks, whereas the animals gather into a dark, tightly connected mass. The contrast prevents the whole landscape from adopting the same congested rhythm. Sky, water and distant stone remain available to view around an event which, at its centre, has become physically inescapable. ^[15]

A proposed companion in 1763

The 1763 Society of Artists exhibition listed Stubbs’s A horse and a lion as no 119, followed by no 120, Its companion. Algernon Graves’s 1907 compilation transcribes Horace Walpole’s annotation describing the horse in no 119 as rising and greatly frightened. The wording identifies an alarmed, upright animal; the companion’s brief catalogue title supplies no equivalent description. ^[16]

Tate’s 1979 catalogue proposes Horse Frightened by a Lion as this canvas’s 1763 companion. Sheepshanks instead identifies a stag and hound; the pairing remains uncertain. ^[1]

Seen together, the two compositions create a substantial change in distance. In the frightened-horse picture, the lion is low on the left and the horse stands on the right, with a broad interval between them. Here that interval has disappeared: the lion is already above the horse’s body. The first composition lets the eye travel across the ground from one animal to the other; the second makes their physical overlap the central fact. ^{[15] [17]}

The horse’s posture changes just as decisively. The companion’s upright body stands clear against the lighter space, its legs supporting a high torso. In the devouring scene the belly and folded limbs sit close to the foreground stone, although the head still rises into the darkness. The contrast is not merely between two expressions of fear. It is between the ability to stand apart and the loss of that independent position. ^{[15] [17]}

The National Heritage Memorial Fund’s account of the series describes seventeen treatments in different media and distinguishes four episodes. Those episodes help locate this collapsed-horse composition within the lion-and-horse series, whose changing states of encounter extend beyond a single pair of paintings. ^[18]

An ancient group through later images

The classical comparison is a Hellenistic marble group of a lion attacking a horse, now in the Capitoline Museums. Its present location is the Marcus Aurelius Exedra. The museum records the sculpture as approximately 1.42 m high and 2.40 m long, a monumental object in its own right. ^[19]

The group’s later history matters to its appearance. Getty’s 2012 exhibition account dates the ancient sculpture to about 325–300 BC and explains that Ruggero Bascapè restored substantial parts in 1594, including the horse’s head, legs and tail and the lion’s rear portions. ^[20]

Building on Taylor’s research, Tate’s 1979 catalogue proposes Ghisi’s engraving or a Giambologna bronze as an intermediary. The horse’s backward turn differs from the marble’s restored, forward-reaching head. ^[1]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds an engraving by Adamo Scultori, also known as Ghisi, dated about 1540–80. Its title is Lion Attacking a Horse, and it belongs to the group of prints known as the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae. The small oval sheet measures 13 × 18 cm. ^[21]

In that engraving, the horse is already low, with its head turned back towards the lion across its body. The animals create a curved, nearly self-contained group against a relatively spare hatched field. Stubbs’s canvas gives a comparable bodily knot a much larger surrounding world: crags, flowing water, trees and an opening into distance. The print’s concentrated animal outline makes the landscape’s contribution to the painting especially apparent. ^{[15] [22]}

Getty also catalogues a bronze attributed to Antonio Susini and dated 1600–25. It belongs to the later history of reconstructing and reworking the ancient group. Such objects demonstrate the availability of alternative arrangements; they do not prove that a particular surviving bronze was Stubbs’s model. ^[20]

Observation and the viewing of distress

Received compositions could coexist with observation of living animals. In its account of Stubbs’s 1788 print of a resting lion, the Metropolitan Museum suggests that he probably studied lions at the Tower of London or Lord Shelburne’s menagerie on Hounslow Heath. These are plausible settings for close observation, although they do not identify a particular animal used for this canvas. ^[23]

The painted horse remains convincing through the difference between its limbs and neck. The lowered body is heavy and broad; the raised head and flowing mane preserve a much more mobile edge. The lion’s position links those contrary movements. Looking closely means following where one body meets the other, rather than treating the horse’s mouth alone as a complete account of the struggle. ^[15]

Aris Sarafianos reads Stubbs’s animal encounters through eighteenth-century debates about bodily sympathy and the sublime. His 2010 discussion argues that Walpole’s preference for the frightened horse favoured a scene in which survival could still be imagined over the more destructive outcome of the devouring picture. That is an interpretation of the proposed contrast, conditional on accepting the companion identification, rather than an independent record of the two paintings’ exhibition together. ^[24]

Sarafianos’s later essay connects the series with Edmund Burke’s distinction between useful domestic animal strength and the terrible power of animals beyond human control. This offers a historically grounded way to consider the painting’s unequal encounter. The horse’s recognisable physical capacities remain visible precisely as they fail to free it; the viewer confronts bodily power acting against bodily vulnerability. ^[25]

Enamel and print: different acts of attack

The 1769 Horse Attacked by a Lion (T01192) is enamel on copper, 24.1 × 28.3 cm: a separate object with overlapping historical titles. ^[25]

Its irregular octagonal format cuts tightly around a white horse and the lion on its back. The horse remains upright, with one foreleg raised, and its head turns back towards the right. In the canvas the warmer-coloured horse has fallen much lower and is embedded in a wider rocky landscape. Comparing the actual images makes the difference in action as clear as the difference in format. ^{[15] [26]}

Graves records another useful piece of exhibition language: the 1770 Society of Artists list included A lion devouring a horse, painted in enamel, no 135. Walpole added a brief favourable annotation. That entry concerns an enamel exhibit; its use of “devouring” does not turn it into the large oil painting. ^[16]

Stubbs’s 1788 A Lion Devouring a Horse also requires separate identification. Christie’s records an impression made by soft-ground etching with roulette, on wove paper, published by the artist in London. It is catalogued as the first of three states, before the address, following Lennox-Boyd, Dixon and Clayton’s catalogue of the engraved work. ^[27]

The print shows a white horse with its legs still extended beneath it and its head turned back towards the left. The lion lies across its back, while dense foliage rises on the right. Unlike the collapsed horse of the canvas, this horse maintains a tall, narrow support beneath its body. The recurring title and attacker therefore accompany a different construction of the event, not a straightforward reproduction of this painting. ^{[15] [28]}

A related painting sold by Sotheby’s in 2018 was catalogued as oil and wax on millboard, with a proposed date in the mid 1770s. Its attribution had been questioned; the auction account reports Alex Kidson’s later endorsement after cleaning. Sotheby’s proposed it as the model for the 1788 print, whereas the print catalogue had suggested a lost enamel. That disagreement concerns a separate work and remains a qualified account of the print’s origin. ^[29]

Historical titles and the journey to Tate

Gilbey’s collection catalogue, published in his 1898 Life of George Stubbs, includes Horse Seized by a Lion. He describes a chestnut horse forced to the ground, a rocky torrent, foliage and an evening sky, giving approximate measurements of 26 × 40 in. This is an important historical witness to the composition under a different title. ^[30]

Tate records Horatio Miller’s ownership and the Royal Academy exhibition in 1876; Gilbey’s Christie’s sale on 11 June 1915 (lot 400) to Algernon Dunn Gardner; and, after gaps, Mrs H. C. Leader’s Sotheby’s sale on 3 April 1968 (lot 142) through Ackermann to Paul Mellon. An anonymous Tate loan followed in February 1973; Mellon gave it to the Yale Center for British Art in 1975; Tate purchased it in 1976. ^[1]

Across its visible forms, the subject moves between separated animals, a standing horse under attack and a body brought to earth. The distinctive achievement of this canvas lies in the last of those arrangements. Its distant light remains open, its water continues to move, and the rock wall stands firm behind a horse whose folded legs can no longer carry it. The larger paintings collection offers other ways Stubbs organised animal bodies within landscape. ^[15]