Horse Frightened by Lion

George Stubbs’s Horse Frightened by a Lion at the Walker Art Gallery is a signed painting of 1770. A white horse recoils beside a lion in a rocky landscape. This is the Liverpool canvas, WAG 2387, rather than the earlier painting of the same title at Tate. ^{[1] [2]}

The encounter occupies surprisingly little of the picture. Above the animals, cliffs, a tree and open sky establish a much larger world. The horse catches the light while the lion’s body almost disappears into shadow. Before any contact occurs, the unequal visibility of the two bodies has already made the meeting dramatic. ^[3]

The Walker painting and its date

The Walker records oil paint on canvas, a support measuring 100.1 × 126.1 cm, and a signature and date at the lower right: Geo: Stubbs / pinxit 1770. The gallery purchased the work in 1910. Its date therefore belongs to this particular canvas, not simply to the beginning of Stubbs’s interest in the subject. ^[1]

It is useful to place the painting within the broader lion and horse series while keeping the individual encounter in view. Here the horse remains upright and the lion has not mounted its back. There is no bite, attached claw or collapsed body. The action is concentrated in the space between the animals, which makes the possibility of an attack more prominent than any completed event. ^[3]

The nearly rectangular field is wider than it is high, but the tall rocks resist a simple horizontal reading. The horse lies below the midpoint of the canvas, towards the right edge. The highest cliff rises at the opposite side. These displaced weights keep the animal from becoming an isolated emblem at the centre; it is a conspicuous inhabitant of a setting that greatly exceeds it. ^[3]

Reading the horse’s recoil

The horse’s head bends towards the left, bringing its muzzle down towards the lion’s level. Its neck forms a sweeping curve, with a thick pale mane spreading across and beyond it. The head is not presented in a flat, detached profile. Turning towards the spectator as well as towards the other animal, it allows the eye, muzzle and curve of the forehead to register together. The body remains more nearly side-on, so the change of direction is visible within a single figure. ^[3]

Below that curved neck, the forelegs make an angular opening. One reaches diagonally down and left; the other is drawn back beneath the chest. The hindquarters are lowered and the hind legs bend sharply. The forms do not align as a regular sequence of parallel supports. Their differing directions make the pose difficult to resolve into a stable stance, even though the figure remains sharply outlined and legible against the darkness. ^[3]

The pale tail sweeps beneath and across the rear of the body instead of extending freely into the landscape. Its soft, spreading shape differs from the firm outline of the legs. The mane produces another irregular edge around the head. Together these two expanses of hair interrupt the horse’s otherwise compact silhouette. The loose edges of the hair keep the body’s sharply defined contours from appearing wholly still. ^[3]

Stubbs gives considerable variation to the white coat. Cool greys pass under the belly and neck, while smaller shadows articulate the shoulder and hindquarters. The brightest passages occur high on the body and in the hair. This is not an unbroken white shape laid over a dark background. Differences within the light area make the torso look rounded, and allow its divisions to remain readable even at a distance. ^[3]

Fear is made visible through these relations of head, legs, body and hair. The painting does not require the spectator to identify a precise riding movement before understanding the interruption to the horse’s balance. Nor does the white coat by itself explain the encounter. The image’s immediate force comes from how the pale body is placed and articulated: exposed to view, drawn back, and turned towards something much less clearly seen. ^[3]

The lion and the interval between them

At first the lion can seem little more than a face emerging beside the horse’s forelegs. The brown mane separates its head from the surrounding darks; the eyes and muzzle provide small points of definition. Its body extends leftwards, but does not acquire the same clear perimeter as the horse. The painting distributes descriptive attention unevenly, allowing the horse to announce the confrontation before the lion becomes fully apparent. ^[3]

The two heads are close without meeting. The horse’s long, pale neck leads down towards this small interval, while the lion’s face is placed low against the rock. The difference in elevation matters: the horse’s body can be seen all at once, but the lion seems to occupy the recess at ground level. The threat comes from a compact presence at the edge of visibility, not from a large animal towering above its intended prey. ^[3]

The lion’s gaze is also less simply sideways than its relation to the horse might suggest. Its face is turned out towards the viewer. We consequently see both animals without occupying either animal’s exact position. This arrangement makes the confrontation accessible to a spectator standing before the painting, while preserving the bodies’ separation within the landscape. It is a constructed pictorial encounter, with several directions of looking operating at once. ^[3]

A landscape of openings and barriers

National Museums Liverpool identifies the landscape’s source as Creswell Crags in Nottinghamshire. ^[1]

The rock formations, however, do much more than locate the scene. At the left, a steep mass rises in successive broken surfaces, with dark hollows below. Across the middle, a lower ledge runs towards the right before opening into another shadowed recess. The horse is set against this second dark area. It is framed by the landscape’s interruptions rather than placed against a continuous screen of foliage. ^[3]

A passage of water appears through the opening at the lower left. Its pale horizontal traces contrast with the rocks’ steeper edges. It gives a glimpse of depth, but it does not become a broad, welcoming foreground. The viewer encounters the dark cliff before reaching that opening. The small stream therefore expands the landscape while remaining partly withheld, a secondary route for the eye alongside the more immediate passage towards the animals. ^[3]

Near the middle, a tree rises against the sky and a long trailing growth descends over the rock below it. These forms divide the view without making a solid wall. Gaps remain between foliage, stone and distant ridge. The tree’s upright direction also interrupts the sloping rock, so that the left half contains several kinds of movement before the eye reaches the horse. No precise botanical identification is needed to see their compositional work. ^[3]

The upper sky is unexpectedly spacious. Blue extends behind large pale clouds, and a distant ridge is visible below. The picture does not envelop every part of the scene in an equivalent darkness. Instead, open air above coexists with the much denser recess around the animals. This makes their low position more striking: there is plenty of sky in the painting, yet very little of it directly surrounds the horse. ^[3]

The foreground offers another contrast. Warm brown rock and earth beneath the horse pick up some of the lion’s colour, linking the dark animal to the ground. The white figure remains apart from this range. Yet its hooves and bent legs meet the same uneven surface, making it physically involved in the setting. Light separates the horse for attention without removing the ground on which the encounter takes place. ^[3]

Observation, recollection and an antique subject

The Walker’s account, also published through its Google Arts & Culture partnership, attributes a story to Ozias Humphry: Stubbs borrowed a royal horse and startled it by pushing a brush towards it. This is a retrospective recollection about obtaining a pose, rather than a contemporary record of a lion confronting that horse. ^{[1] [3]}

The Walker calls the story that Stubbs witnessed a lion kill a horse in North Africa apocryphal. It supplies no secure eyewitness origin for this painting. ^[1]

Another proposed source is the ancient Lion Attacking a Horse associated with the Capitoline collections in Rome. That sculpture has a complicated material history. Getty’s account explains that the group survived as a fragment and that its missing parts were supplied in a restoration of 1594. Engravings and replicas helped transmit it to later artists. The classical model was therefore available through more than one object or image, and in a form already shaped by intervention. ^{[17] [18]}

The distinction between an attacking group and the Walker scene is fundamental. Here the lion is not attached to the horse. The horse has room to turn, and its back remains uninterrupted by another body. Even if a sculptural struggle helped suggest the broader theme, this canvas asks what an encounter could look like before the two animals are joined. Its separation of the figures is an imaginative transformation of the subject, not a literal repetition of a sculptural group. ^{[18] [3]}

The earlier Tate version

Tate’s Horse Frightened by a Lion, T06869, is a separate oil on canvas, catalogued as possibly exhibited in 1763. Its record gives unconfirmed dimensions of 70.5 × 101.9 cm and an acquisition in 1994. Tate associates it, with qualification, with the companion pictures shown at the Society of Artists in 1763. Those exhibition and acquisition details do not describe the Walker painting dated seven years later. ^[2]

Seen side by side, the differences are immediate. Tate’s horse is golden brown with a pale mane and tail. It occupies much more of the right half, while the lion is more completely visible at the left. The horse’s head projects into a lighter opening beside the rocks. The Walker’s white horse is smaller within a taller landscape and has darkness behind its head. Changing the coat colour is only one part of the revision: scale, surrounding space and visibility have changed with it. ^{[2] [3]}

In Tate’s composition, the long diagonal foreleg points towards the low lion across a conspicuous strip of ground. In Liverpool, the lion’s face sits closer to the pale horse’s angular forelegs, and the larger rocks take up more of the field above. The earlier canvas allows the animal group to spread; the Walker compresses it beneath an enlarged setting. These alternatives show why a shared title cannot stand in for the appearance of a particular version. ^{[2] [3]}

Tate’s proposed companion is Horse Devoured by a Lion. Its pairing belongs to the earlier exhibition history. The Walker canvas can be understood within the same recurring subject without assuming that every frightened-horse picture originally had its own matching pendant. Repetition across years and formats gave Stubbs several ways to reconsider a moment of alarm. ^[2]

Paintings and prints with similar titles

The printed versions require equally careful identification. Cleveland’s A Horse Frightened by a Lion, accession 1985.38, is an etching and engraving of 1777, catalogued as state I or II of III. It is a print by George Stubbs, rather than a later date for the Liverpool oil. ^[19]

In that impression the horse occupies the left, with the lion at the right. A substantial plant rises between them, and tall rock closes the right side. The arrangement resembles the earlier Tate design in reverse more closely than it repeats the Walker’s expansive upper sky and small low group. The horse is modelled with many short marks while the rocks and clouds gather dense, crossing lines. The print offers a materially different account of light: pale paper and dark marks perform work that colour performs in the paintings. ^[19]

The 1777 impression’s lettering identifies Stubbs as both painter and engraver, then gives a London publication date of 25 September 1777 in his own name. Artist, printmaker and publisher are brought together on the sheet itself. This helps explain the importance of reading the margin as well as the scene: a similar horse and lion can circulate through quite different arrangements of authorship. Cleveland’s cautious identification as either the first or second state also leaves a narrower question open. Its record does not choose between those two states, even though the plate and the year are established. ^[19]

George Townley Stubbs also made The Horse and Lion after George Stubbs. A documented impression offered at Dominic Winter in 2025 is catalogued as a mezzotint published by John Wesson on 20 September 1770. Its title and lettering had been trimmed away, preventing a secure state identification for that sheet. The shared year does not establish that the print reproduces the Walker canvas. ^[20]

A further plate, A Horse Affrighted at a Lion, was published on 1 May 1788. The Metropolitan Museum’s impression, 1970.603.1, is an etching with roulette work, third state of three, on a sheet measuring 25.1 × 30.5 cm. This is another distinct printed object, with its own date, process and state history. ^[21]

Here the large pale horse fills the left side and the lion occupies the lower right. The pair are brought much closer to the edges than in the Walker painting. The turned head, folded hindquarters and streaming mane invite comparison with Liverpool’s white horse, but their direction is reversed and the immense landscape has contracted to rock, dark space and a small patch of vegetation. The resulting encounter feels more compressed because the group now occupies almost the entire image field. ^{[21] [3]}

These changes are easier to follow by comparing whole images before comparing titles. Reversed direction, an enlarged body or a reduced landscape can all alter the scene’s emphasis. A print’s date also belongs to its publication history; it does not automatically date the painting that supplied an idea. The wider survey of Stubbs’s prints follows the relationships between artists, plates, publishers and impressions. ^{[19] [21] [3]}

The sublime and the problem of sympathy

The contemporary language of the sublime helps explain why such a subject could carry ambitions beyond animal portraiture. In his Philosophical Enquiry, Edmund Burke distinguished the ordinary usefulness of the horse from its capacity to appear terrible and powerful. More generally, he connected the sublime with fear, danger and an arresting force that could precede deliberate reasoning. This was a theory of human response, not a description of an animal’s inner experience. ^[22]

Applied to this picture, the distinction directs attention to the absence of service. The horse carries no rider, pulls no vehicle and performs no visible task. Its body is displayed in a moment that interrupts purposeful movement. The spectator can admire its strength while also seeing its exposure beside the lion. The picture’s beauty and its disturbing subject occupy the same field, making a comfortable, solely decorative response difficult to sustain. ^{[22] [3]}

Aris Sarafianos’s study of Stubbs, Walpole and Burke argues that anatomical knowledge and powerful emotional effects work together in these pictures. He also discusses Stephen Daniels’s alternative emphasis on trained equestrian poses and a landscape shaped by eighteenth-century taste. The disagreement is useful: a scene that looks like remote wilderness may also bear the traces of human training and pictorial staging. These are interpretations of the painting’s construction and reception, rather than proof of a single message intended by Stubbs. ^[17]

Horace Walpole’s poem about a startled horse supplies an important earlier response. Sarafianos connects it to the 1763 picture and discusses how the poet imagined his own physical feelings answering the painted animal’s distress. It should not be presented as a review of the Walker canvas of 1770. It shows instead that the earlier subject had already encouraged spectators to describe a forceful exchange between looking and feeling. ^[17]

Collection history and changing interpretations

The painting has subsequently been seen in several different contexts. National Museums Liverpool’s annual report for 2005–06 records its loan to Stubbs and the Horse, shown at the National Gallery in London and at two American venues. That exhibition title foregrounded the horse as a subject extending across his work. ^[23]

In 2016 it appeared in Stubbs and the Wild at the Holburne Museum in Bath. Caroline Cannon-Brookes’s review identifies the Walker canvas within an exhibition of wild-animal paintings and prints. That setting placed the encounter beside other forms of animal observation and invention. The same image could lead viewers towards Stubbs’s horses or towards his work with less familiar species, depending on the works surrounding it. ^[24]

A different afterlife appears in Jane O’Sullivan’s 2013 account of her own painting and writing experiment. She selected the Walker composition, removed the lion and brought its white horse into relation with the harnessed horses of Constable’s The Hay Wain. Her intervention challenged the use of animals as vehicles for human stories and questioned human control over them. This is an explicitly modern response, not a recovered eighteenth-century explanation of the original. ^[25]

O’Sullivan’s example demonstrates how much a change of counterpart can alter the image’s story. Where the horse turns towards a predator in Stubbs, her adaptation makes labour and harnessing the threatening prospect. It does not settle the Walker painting’s meaning; it reveals the continuing usefulness of its conspicuous turned body for new acts of interpretation. A familiar pose remains recognisable even when the surrounding narrative is replaced. ^[25]

The Courtauld makes another, more restrained comparison in its account of Sawrey Gilpin’s Study of frightened horses. It relates Gilpin’s dramatic animals to the Walker painting through their shared engagement with the sublime. This is a comparison of artistic concerns, not evidence that the drawing copies Stubbs. It places the Liverpool canvas among several attempts to make horses carry a picture’s fear and danger through their posture. ^[26]

Returning to the Walker image after these different readings, the arrangement retains its particular clarity. The broad sky, broken rocks, narrow glimpse of water and small animal group all remain necessary to the view. Removing any one of them would change the balance between exposure and enclosure. The white horse is the brightest point, but its surroundings determine how that brightness is encountered. The painting’s lasting interest lies in the relation between an acutely legible body and a landscape that gives much less away. ^[3]