Bolingbroke’s Mares and Foals

George Stubbs painted Mares and Foals belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke about 1761–62. This oil on canvas, 99 × 187 cm, is now in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, accession AP 2024.01. Three mares stand with three foals. ^[1]

Six horses occupy a strip of grass beside water. A large mare stretches across the centre; smaller bodies gather towards either end. Above them, grey clouds mingle with patches of blue, and a tree extends its branches into the open sky. The animals are close enough for their outlines to overlap, yet each can be followed as a separate presence. Their different orientations make a still group continually change as the eye moves across it. ^[2]

The painting has also circulated as Mares and Foals Disturbed by an Approaching Storm. That descriptive title survives in an older Christie’s Images picture-agency record. ^[3]

Six horses, three different encounters

Start at the left. The mare’s body faces towards us, while her neck curves to bring her head around to the smaller horse beside her. The foal stands almost in profile, its muzzle near the larger animal’s face. Their contact occupies very little painted space, but it links two contrasting shapes: the mare’s broad chest and turning neck, and the foal’s longer horizontal outline. The mare’s angled legs prevent the pair from becoming a rigid, symmetrical unit. ^[2]

At the centre, the largest uninterrupted silhouette belongs to a mare facing left. Her head rises above those of her neighbours, and the line from neck to back carries the eye towards the right-hand group. Light catches the shoulder and flank while darker passages articulate the underside of the neck and belly. The body has substantial weight, held above legs which look remarkably slender against it. There is room beneath the belly to see through to the landscape, so the animal occupies the foreground without sealing it off. ^[2]

The foal nearest the viewer turns its hindquarters towards us. Its neck bends rightwards and its dark head enters the space below the right-hand mare’s muzzle. This turn introduces a direction into depth, interrupting the largely lateral arrangement of the adults. The foal’s rounded hindquarters and tapering legs present a different account of a horse’s structure from the centre mare’s broadside. Its tail hangs between the rear legs, making a dark vertical within a body seen at an angle. ^[2]

A further foal stands close to the right edge, facing left. Behind it, the adult mare faces in the same general direction, but their heads sit at different heights. The foal’s muzzle reaches towards the darker young horse turning across the foreground. Here the outlines become more closely interwoven than at the left: heads, necks and legs intersect, with small openings of landscape between them. The right-hand group consequently requires slower attention than the clear span of the central body. ^[2]

The three encounters establish a rhythm without giving the animals identical poses. One foal approaches a face, another turns away from the viewer, and the third stands side-on within the denser gathering. Raised heads and visible eyes make the animals seem attentive; their feet remain distributed across the turf rather than launching into a common movement. The picture’s interest lies in these small differences of direction and contact. There is no single gesture which all six repeat. ^[2]

Cloud, water and the open landscape

The sky occupies nearly half the painting. Its clouds are uneven in density: darker masses collect above and behind the horses, while cooler blue openings remain visible towards the upper left. A paler diagonal draws the eye up from the central mare’s head into the cloud field. This is a changing sky, with light passing through it, rather than an unbroken dark canopy. Its large, soft forms give the sharp contours of ears and muzzles particular clarity. ^[2]

The tree enters from the right edge and reaches over the group. Its trunk forms a narrow upright, while the branches spread leftwards above the animals without enclosing them in a complete arch. Much of the opposite side remains open. This unequal distribution matters: the horses stand between an opening towards distant fields at the left and the closer mass of foliage at the right. Their varying turns have a counterpart in the landscape’s movement between openness and enclosure. ^[2]

Water runs horizontally behind the horses’ legs. Its grey surface separates the immediate green bank from the brighter stretches beyond, introducing a quieter interval beneath the activity of the heads. At the far left, fields, trees and boundaries diminish into the distance. The foreground, by contrast, contains scattered small plants and patches of light on grass. These successive bands make depth easy to follow without requiring a road, a rider or a building to lead us through the scene. ^[2]

The horses’ coats range through warm browns against the cooler water and cloud. Light falls unevenly: the central mare’s flank presents a broad illuminated surface, while the left adult’s turning body alternates rounded highlights with shadow. The foals repeat the general colours in smaller, differently angled forms. Such variations keep the group from reading as six dark shapes pasted against a pale background. Colour, contour and the spaces between legs work together to make the animals belong to the same stretch of ground. ^[2]

Bolingbroke’s stud and the place behind it

A brood mare is a mare kept for breeding. Judy Egerton’s account of Stubbs’s patrons explains why these groups mattered to horse owners: choosing breeding stock involved considerable expense, and foals represented possible future racers and breeders. The graceful pastoral therefore also belonged to the world of bloodstock. Her discussion treats such commissions as portraits of particular animals, even when they appear free of riding equipment. ^[17]

The patron was Frederick St John, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke. The Kimbell identifies the setting as probably his estate at Lydiard Tregoze, Wiltshire. ^[1]

Lydiard’s landscape had itself been shaped. Wessex Archaeology’s account of its investigations describes an eighteenth-century change from formal gardens towards open views, walks and ornamental features associated with the remodelled house. The surviving lake dam and walled garden belong to that designed environment. This provides a useful setting for the painting’s broad water and open parkland: a country estate could look spacious and informal while remaining carefully managed. The archaeological history helps explain that kind of landscape; it does not establish the precise position from which Stubbs composed this view. ^[18]

Within the painting, no owner or attendant steps forward to claim the horses. There are no visible reins joining them to a handler, and no saddle places one animal in readiness for a rider. Instead, the repeated heads and bodies provide their own centres of attention. The viewer meets the group at close range, with the water and distant ground kept behind it. The absence of a human figure leaves the relationships between the horses to carry the immediate action. ^[2]

The family’s eventual departure changed the setting in which its pictures were encountered. The Lydiard Archives records that the 6th Viscount left the house following his mother’s death in 1940 and offered paintings for sale when money was short. Its surviving auction catalogue belonged to him and contains annotations of results. These documents place the dispersal within the history of the house, rather than treating the canvas’s movement as an isolated art-market event. ^[19]

A series of distinct paintings

Related compositions show how adaptable the subject became. Rockingham paid for five mares and two foals in August 1762; his group has a plain background. The later Midleton composition, now Tate’s Mares and Foals in a River Landscape, reuses elements of Rockingham’s arrangement. Rockingham’s group contains seven horses and Tate’s five; each has a separate patron and history from Bolingbroke’s six-horse canvas. ^{[17] [20] [21]}

A further distinction is the National Trust’s Five Brood Mares at the Duke of Cumberland’s Stud, dated 1765. Its holder identifies it as Stubbs’s first royal commission, from George III’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland. Five adult mares, a different owner and the Windsor stud context give it an identity of its own. Similar dimensions and a broad arrangement of horses do not make it a version of Bolingbroke’s painting. ^[22]

Print titles can also conceal a different original. The Government Art Collection’s Brood Mares, published on 14 November 1776, is Benjamin Green’s mezzotint after Colonel George Lane Parker’s painting, exhibited in 1768. The print reverses its painted source. Green’s plate had appeared earlier and was subsequently acquired by Sayer & Bennett for reissue. It belongs with Parker’s Brood Mares and Foals, rather than providing a reproductive history for the Kimbell canvas. ^[23]

The Kimbell considers this probably the earliest commission among Stubbs’s mares-and-foals groups, and probably the mares picture exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1762. ^[24]

Earlier, Egerton proposed Rockingham’s group for that exhibit, A Brood of Mares, number 110. The exhibition identification therefore remains qualified. ^[25]

From the family collection to the 1943 sale

Egerton’s study of Bolingbroke’s patronage identifies the mares painting with lot 81 in the March 1780 sale of his pictures. She reports the auctioneer’s notes naming Bolingbroke as seller and his son George St John as buyer. ^[26]

The Kimbell allows either purchase or buy-in by his son, and records subsequent family descent. ^[1]

The surviving catalogue of the auction on 10 December 1943 gives a particularly clear description. Under George Stubbs, lot 50 is A Group of Six Mares and Foals, in a landscape, measuring 39 by 74 inches. The wording records the number of horses and their setting, without turning the clouded sky into the subject of the title. It is a practical description of the object offered for sale, and an important witness to its identity before its later circulation under a storm title. ^[27]

The same printed page groups it with three other Stubbs paintings: lot 48, the Gimcrack composition; lot 49, Turf with a jockey; and lot 51, a favourite horse shown beside a river with house and church beyond. The preceding page identifies these as property of Viscount Bolingbroke. The mares picture thus emerged from a collection containing several forms of equestrian portraiture, including racing and a single horse in an estate setting. ^[27]

The year 1943 also brought the sale of Lydiard House and 147 acres to Swindon Corporation. Wessex Archaeology describes the building’s rescue and subsequent restoration for public use. The estate and its pictures followed different paths: preserving the house did not preserve the complete family collection within its rooms. Today the history of Lydiard and that of this canvas connect Britain and Texas through those separate changes of ownership. ^[18]

Later owners and the move to Fort Worth

After the 1943 sale, Knoedler and Agnew shared ownership; a 1946 profit division is recorded. The painting passed to Mrs J. A. Dewar, probably in 1946 or by 1957; to her daughter, Viscountess Ward, probably in 1966–67 or by 1970; then to her son David Astor. A private purchase through Dickinson followed in 1994 or 1995. Further private ownership preceded the Kimbell Art Foundation’s purchase in 2024, in memory of Ben J. Fortson. It had previously been lent to the Kimbell’s Stubbs and the Horse exhibition in 2004–05. ^{[1] [24]}

Dickinson’s own review of 2024 records its role in the acquisition. It also describes the painting’s new company at the museum: Gainsborough’s Going to Market, Early Morning and Raeburn’s The Allen Brothers. This was a documented arrangement following the purchase, bringing equestrian, rural and human subjects together within the Kimbell’s British collection. It gives the acquisition a history of display as well as a change of address. ^[28]

The frame and the painting’s presentation

A specialist essay published by The Frame Blog in May 2026 draws attention to the canvas’s Maratta frame. It identifies four bands of ornament: an ovolo chain along the outer edge, ribbon and stave below the top edge, an applied acanthus-and-shield element in the hollow, and another ovolo chain beside the painting. In plainer terms, successive carved mouldings carry the eye from the outer boundary towards the painted surface. ^[29]

The essay suggests that this may be a later frame. Its unusually broad rails and applied acanthus ornament differ from features found on many original Stubbs frames of this type. A change after the 1943 sale is proposed as a possibility, not a documented event. That distinction matters to the painting’s presentation: the richly ornamented surround now associated with it cannot simply be treated as the design chosen by Stubbs and Bolingbroke. ^[29]

Anatomy, attention and interpretation

Stubbs published The Anatomy of the Horse in 1766. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s copy identifies him as both writer and illustrator, with the illustrations made as etchings. The book and the canvas are different forms of work: one sets out structures in a publication; the other brings bodies into relation within a landscape. His anatomical studies help explain the sustained attention to equine form across his practice. ^[30]

The significance of that attention has prompted a wider scholarly debate. Reviewing Stubbs and the Horse in 2005, Alexis Joachimides described Malcolm Warner’s connection between Stubbs’s horses and eighteenth-century sensibility: a growing concern with animals as beings capable of feeling. Joachimides also questioned how fully the account distinguished the artist’s contribution from the interests and reforming attitudes of his patrons. The debate concerns the interpretation of Stubbs’s practice, rather than a documented statement of intention for this particular canvas. ^[31]

For Bolingbroke’s painting, this leaves a productive question about attention and ownership. The individuality visible in a group portrait could serve the breeder who commissioned it while also encouraging a viewer to consider the animals closely. Sympathy and possession need not be treated as mutually exclusive explanations. The historical discussion gives that question substance without assigning a single human emotion to every turned head. ^[31]