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George Stubbs Lion attacking
a stag This painting was intended as a later companion -- or pendant -- to Stubbs's monumental image Horse Attacked by a Lion (to which it is adjacent in the Library Court); both pictures hung in the London residence at 4 Grovesnor Square of the man who commissioned them, Charles Watson Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham. Stubbs drew his inspiration for these terrifying scenes of lions attacking and devouring other animals from the philosophical ideas espoused by Edmund Burke, whose first edition of A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautirful appeared in 1757; Burke and his contemporaries held that terror, danger and fear produced in viewers, "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." The painter clearly wished his pictures to capture this terrible beauty inherent in Nature: the raw and savage forces of the animal kingdom quite overwhelm human strength and scale, and the wild and gloomy landscape (in this case seen in the deep of night) harbors a violent, amoral world of animal nature. |