Josiah Wedgwood and George Stubbs
Artist and Industrialist have rarely succeeded in establishing a fruitful alliance. But during the latter years of the eighteenth century, writes Neil McKendrick, such an alliance was formed—with results that we admire today. Wedgwood, a great potter, and Stubbs, a celebrated painter, agreed to pool their very different gifts.
Much of the life of George Stubbs has been lost to posterity. Born in Liverpool in 1724, he died at the age of eighty-one in 1806. Of the years between little is known. Such facts as his visit to Rome, his work at Horkstow, his move to London and his quarrel with the Royal Academy form a tenuous chronology of events.
But of his relationships with his contemporaries even less is recorded with certainty. He emerges from his obscurity, however, for a brief period in the letters of Josiah Wedgwood to his partner Thomas Bentley, especially during his three months’ stay at Etruria in the late autumn of 1780.1 For few of his contemporaries were so interested in his work and so concerned with its production as Wedgwood; and with few were his relations more productive.
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