10th Light Dragoons

George Stubbs’s Soldiers of the 10th Light Dragoons, dated 1793, brings four men and a single horse into a remarkably formal landscape. The oil painting belongs to the Royal Collection, where it is numbered RCIN 400512. Uniforms, equipment and differences of rank receive the concentrated attention that Stubbs gave to the bodies of his horses. ^[1]

Four soldiers, one horse

The Royal Collection identifies the figures as a mounted sergeant, a trumpeter, another sergeant and a private. Its description accompanies a later colour reproduction after the painting, rather than an original print by Stubbs. The identification matters because the group represents different positions within the regiment: these are not four interchangeable officers gathered for a collective portrait. ^[15]

The horse occupies the left half of the picture, facing towards the standing men. Its broad flank, rising neck and lowered muzzle form a continuous sequence of curves. The rider sits upright above this mass, holding his drawn sword nearly vertical. Against the darker coat and horse, the pale blade becomes a particularly clear line. The arrangement gives the mounted figure height without placing him at the centre of the canvas. ^[1]

Three men stand to the right. Their feet establish a repeated rhythm along the foreground, while their bodies rise separately into the sky. Small intervals between them preserve the distinct outline of each uniform and weapon. The trumpeter, closest to the horse, provides the strongest colour change. His yellow coat interrupts the blue clothing of the other soldiers, and the instrument hanging from his hand introduces a diagonal beside otherwise upright figures. ^[1]

The landscape does not compete with this display. A low horizon leaves a considerable expanse of cloud above the men, and the ground offers relatively few obstacles to following the row of feet and hooves. The horse’s horizontal body and the standing men’s vertical silhouettes divide the picture into unequal but balanced parts. The whole group feels deliberately presented to view, even though it stands in open country rather than against an architectural backdrop. ^[1]

The regiment and the Prince

The word Light is an essential part of the historical title. Richard Cannon’s official regimental history, published in 1843, records the conversion of the Tenth to light dragoons in 1783 and its new association with the Prince of Wales. An order reproduced there gives the name as the Tenth, or Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Light Dragoons. Cannon also records a change from scarlet clothing to blue in 1784. ^[16]

The Prince’s relationship with the unit developed in stages. Cannon distinguishes his appointment as commandant in 1793 from his appointment as colonel on 18 July 1796. The earlier date belongs to the year of Stubbs’s painting. The distinction helps explain why accounts can connect the Prince with the regiment in 1793 while the National Army Museum dates his colonelcy to 1796. ^{[16] [17]}

The regiment’s later identity as hussars should not be read backwards into this picture. The National Army Museum places that transformation in 1806, after the period represented here. Stubbs’s men belong to the light-dragoon phase of its history, despite the regiment’s better-known later name. ^[17]

Cannon describes repeated royal reviews and escort duties, and records the regiment’s encampment at Brighton in August 1793. These activities give the painting a context of military appearance and royal attention. They do not identify the particular field in the picture or establish that Stubbs recorded a specific review. The formal arrangement can be understood without turning its landscape into a documented event. ^[16]

Uniform as a visible distinction

The clothing establishes connections across the group before the viewer identifies every rank. White belts cross the dark-blue coats, while pale breeches and dark footwear continue the repetition lower down. Yellow appears at collars, cuffs and other edges, and on the horse’s conspicuous saddlecloth. The trumpeter’s coat makes this colour occupy a much larger area, giving him a different visual weight from the two standing men beside him. ^[1]

The men also differ in what they carry and how they hold it. The mounted soldier’s exposed sword rises above the horse. To the right, long firearms and fixed bayonets extend the standing figures’ outlines. A National Army Museum catalogue entry for a modern reproduction describes the sergeant as shouldering arms and the private as presenting arms. The group therefore displays contrasting military functions and positions as well as a shared uniform. ^[18]

Stubbs makes the equipment legible without filling the setting with action. The straps, repeated loops across the coats and pale blade offer sharply directed lines; the horse supplies a much broader, rounded form. Looking between them brings out the difference between an animal’s body and the ordered surfaces carried upon human bodies. The distinctions remain readable within a single coherent group. ^[1]

An experimental painting medium

The painting’s materials received scientific attention in John Mills and Raymond White’s 1985 study of ten works by Stubbs. Their table identifies this work as a canvas with a prepared ground. Analysis found drying oil and pine resin, together with a component that could not be securely distinguished as non-drying oil or fat, or beeswax. This was a more complicated medium than the simple label oil on canvas conveys. ^[19]

The target samples were small. Higher esters were present, but not in the proportions expected for beeswax, and the characteristic hydrocarbon pattern could not be distinguished. The authors therefore retained the ambiguity. The painting was examined by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry; the study’s exclusion of The Phaeton from that examination applies to the separate carriage painting, not to these soldiers. ^[19]

The particular drying oil could not be specified. Mills and White considered possible conservation materials, while noting the results’ overall consistency. Their suggestion of a wax-resin medium fused by heat concerned at least three earlier, oil-free panels, not this canvas. These distinctions matter when comparing Stubbs’s technique and other material experiments. ^[19]

Framing and royal display

The painting’s frame gives the military display an elaborate boundary. A recent specialist discussion in The Frame Blog identifies it with Thomas Allwood and describes its entablature form and frieze of bunched leaves. The supplied photographs distinguish this design from the fluted hollow frame around William Anderson with Two Saddle-Horses. Both belong to the Prince of Wales’s group of Stubbs paintings. ^[1]

The same account cites two bills from Allwood: one dated 14 February 1793 for eight frames, and another dated 11 May for two more. The surviving documentation does not securely allocate each painting to a particular bill or frame pattern. What it does show is that framing formed part of the expense and presentation of the Prince’s commissions, rather than an incidental addition to them. ^[1]

The Royal Collection places this painting within thirteen similarly sized canvases dated between 1790 and 1793, acquired by George IV when Prince of Wales. That broader grouping connects the soldiers with Stubbs’s animals and sporting subjects in the royal collection. RCIN 400512 is, however, explicitly excepted from the group’s move from Carlton House to the King’s Lodge in 1822. Its later movements require separate evidence. ^[20]

Earlier catalogues and later viewers

Walter Gilbey’s 1898 book reproduces an older catalogue description of the work among paintings at Windsor. It calls the mounted man a soldier and describes a bugler, corporal and private before him; the continuation also uses the title Two Corporals, a Private and a Trumpeter. Those labels preserve a history of cataloguing that differs from the modern identification of two sergeants. ^[21]

Gilbey records references to the Carlton House Armoury in the catalogues of 1816 and 1819, with the respective numbers 480 and 522. His appendix also gives a figure of fifty guineas. That historical catalogue figure is not, by itself, a record of the amount Stubbs received for painting the work. The early inventory setting is more informative than an unsupported reconstruction of the original transaction. ^[21]

The picture made a strong impression on Sanford Schwartz when it appeared in the Yale retrospective of 1985. In The New Yorker, he admired its direct arrangement and sensuous paint, finding both grandeur and comedy in its formality. His contrast between the mounted man’s pride and the standing soldiers’ smaller, less settled expressions was a critic’s reading of their poses. It remains a useful response to the tension between regimental order and individual presence. ^[22]