Gallery-goers interested in viewing the handful of paintings by George Stubbs (1724–1806) on loan from the Yale Center for British Art will have to engage in the museological equivalent of hunting and pecking. The eight canvases are snuggled almost imperceptibly within the Met’s collection of European painting and are surrounded by those of his countrymen, including Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Gainsborough, and, in a disappointingly sanguine mood, William Hogarth. As the Yale Center’s Louis I. Kahn building undergoes restoration, New Yorkers have been offered a sampling of an artist best known for paintings of horses. Given how large exhibitions can tax one’s attention, who’s to say the less-is-more approach is a bad thing? The encompassing overview of John Singer Sargent’s portraits, concurrently on view at the Met, all but exhausts one’s capability for pleasure: the hits just keep on coming. A smattering of pictures, on the other hand, allows for a degree of measure that encourages focus.
Of course, Sargent was a greater artist than Stubbs. Stubbs had nowhere near the American’s facility—few painters do—and distilling the quiddities of personality was less important than representational accuracy. Sargent deserves the gala treatment; Stubbs, not so much. Even on the slim evidence at the Met, the narrow range of Stubbs’s talents and interests is evident. A brittleness in execution—a lack of spatial pliability and compositional invention—can make him seem an inspired folk painter. Stubbs was, in fact, self-taught. An apprenticeship with the painter and engraver Hamlet