Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B2001.2.122
Gallery Label:
This is probably the first of at least ten paintings that George Stubbs made for the racing enthusiast Frederick St. John, second Viscount Bolingbroke, profligate heir to a great fortune (another, Turf, with Jockey Up, is shown nearby). Bolingbroke may have commissioned it after becoming familiar with similar pictures of racehorses by Stubbs at Althorp, home to his unloved and unfaithful wife, Lady Diana Spencer. Although of illustrious parentage, Lustre was not a winning racehorse and enjoyed only one successful season in 1760 before Bolingbroke sold him in 1762. Lustre nonetheless inspired this exceptional picture in which a liveried groom leads the horse through a rolling landscape beneath a turbulent sky, the setting perhaps intended for Bolingbroke’s estate at Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire. Stubbs had an unrivaled understanding of equine anatomy, having spent eighteen months dissecting horses in the later 1750s—research that led to the publication of his seminal Anatomy of the Horse in 1766.\n\n Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016