A Monkey

George Stubbs's A Monkey in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, is signed and dated 1799. Painted in oils on mahogany panel, it measures 70 × 55.9 cm and has the collection number WAG 2386. It repeats an earlier composition painted in 1774. ^[1]

A seated animal interrupts the darkness of a wooded setting. Its head turns towards us while one arm reaches across to a branch at the right. The other hand gathers fruit close to its body. ^[2]

A body caught between directions

The monkey's face and its reaching arm establish different lines of attention. The arm travels away from the body towards the tree, but the head turns out of that movement. This makes the pose feel interrupted: the activity continues at one side while the face meets the spectator. The picture holds these directions together without requiring a second figure to explain the encounter. ^[2]

The nearer arm bends across the torso. Its horizontal movement brings the hand and the warm patch of fruit towards the centre, below the face. Above it, the other arm forms a rising diagonal. Between the two, a dark opening separates the limbs and makes their different positions easy to follow. The arms do more than surround the body; they establish the principal intervals within the upper half of the composition. ^[2]

Below, one leg descends towards the foreground while the other is folded up. The rock beneath the animal provides a firm, compact support, but the tail escapes that compactness. It drops behind the seat and curves along the lower edge, carrying the figure's outline almost across the width of the painting. Its long horizontal sweep steadies the more angular movements above. ^[2]

The animal occupies the left half of the panel, yet the composition does not simply balance it with an equal mass on the right. Instead, the reaching arm connects it to the tree. A hanging fruit marks the space between them, and the group of fruit near the bottom supplies another concentration of warm colour. These smaller shapes carry attention through the surrounding darkness. ^[2]

Fruit and enclosure

The fruit appears in three different relationships to the body: held in the nearer hand, suspended from the branch and gathered on the ground. This distribution makes the activity readable without showing a sequence of separate moments. We can follow the passage between tree, grasp and ground, but the picture leaves the exact next movement suspended. ^[2]

Dark foliage extends above the animal. The space overhead makes the monkey seem enclosed rather than enlarged to fill every available inch. The head is conspicuous because its rounded outline emerges against the background. The effect depends on the surrounding shadow as much as on the light across the face. ^[2]

An uncertain identification

The Walker's current account offers two possibilities for the animal: a rhesus monkey or a crab-eating macaque from South East Asia. The museum's Google Arts & Culture commentary suggests that Stubbs might have encountered the animal in a London menagerie. Its individual identity and the circumstances of the sitting remain unknown. ^[1]

The Walker has found no evidence connecting the earlier monkey with the Hunters or Banks, despite Stubbs's work for those scientific patrons. The animal's owner therefore remains unidentified. ^[1]

For a wider view of the different encounters behind his animal subjects, see Stubbs's exotic animals. His Comparative Anatomical Exposition offers another way to explore his attention to animal bodies.

A composition returns to exhibition

The Royal Academy's catalogue for 1775 lists Stubbs's Portrait of a monkey as number 304. It accompanied his portrait of Euston and two dog portraits. The horse and dogs have named owners in their entries; the monkey does not. Its exhibition title establishes a subject, without supplying a comparable personal history. ^[17]

The catalogue of 1799 records A monkey as number 177, by ‘G. Stubbs, A.’ It follows R. C. Barnett's view of Blenheim Park and precedes George Morland's Landscape and figures. The Academy's membership list records him as an Associate. ^[18]

The catalogue explains that its numbers follow the order of the pictures in the room, beginning over the door. The neighbouring entries consequently give the monkey a setting among landscapes, rather than within a separate display devoted to animals. ^[18]

Richard Johns makes that repetition central to his account of the later exhibition. He notes that the Academy's rules excluded pictures copied from other pictures or prints. The monkey's reappearance consequently raised a question about originality as well as natural likeness. Johns explores the possibility of a joke at the Academy's expense, but there is no recorded explanation from Stubbs that settles his purpose. ^[19]

Repetition need not produce the same historical encounter. Johns also places the later showing beside contemporary monkey caricatures and paintings celebrating the Battle of the Nile. He proposes that an audience preoccupied with the French campaign could have found a new political resonance in the animal and its fruit. This is a reading of the exhibition's circumstances, rather than evidence that the composition had originally been invented as an image of Napoleon. ^[19]

Nature and imitation

The Frick Collection's exhibition commentary offers a different emphasis. It interprets the monkey through the old idea of art as an imitation, or ‘ape’, of nature. On this account, an apparently convincing animal becomes an argument about the painter's inventive power. The peach supplies a further verbal joke: a spectator persuaded by the illusion has been ‘peached’, or deceived by the eyes. This is an interpretation of Stubbs's picture, rather than an explanation preserved in his own words. ^[20]

Johns brings Chardin's image of a monkey painter into his discussion of Stubbs's composition. ^[19]

Chardin's Le Singe peintre, dated about 1739–40 by the Louvre, provides a useful comparison. ^[21]

Chardin dresses his monkey in a coat and a broad hat, placing it at an easel with a brush. Its head turns away from the canvas towards us. In Stubbs's painting, the outward turn and extended arm belong to an unclothed animal holding fruit. There is no easel or painted canvas within the scene. Where Chardin makes the animal's occupation explicit through clothes and equipment, Stubbs leaves the connection with human activity more open. ^{[2] [21]}

The fruit has encouraged other proposals. The Walker's partner commentary suggests an association with Eden and humanity's original state of nature. ^[1]

W. D. Ian Rolfe and Caroline Grigson propose a different possibility in their study of Stubbs's primate imagery. They connect the peach with silence and with eighteenth-century speculation about whether monkeys possessed reason while withholding speech. They frame the association as a question. Their argument supplies a historical possibility for interpreting the motif, without establishing that this was Stubbs's intended message. ^[22]

From studio to gallery

The Walker records that one version remained with Stubbs until his death. Later ownership entries name T. Humphry Ward, Hood and Renton. The dealer Walker's Galleries handled the later panel before its purchase by the Walker Art Gallery in 1950. ^[1]