Whistlejacket is famous because George Stubbs painted a racehorse at life-size, rearing on its hind legs, and left everything else out. There is no rider, no field and no stable, only the horse against a pale gold ground. It is one of the rare great paintings in which an animal is the whole subject.
The horse was real. Whistlejacket won a famous match race at York in 1759 and belonged to the Marquess of Rockingham, one of the richest men in England, who commissioned the portrait around 1762. The canvas is nearly three meters tall and about two and a half wide.
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What the canvas shows is a chestnut stallion in a levade, the dressage position in which a horse stands with his weight on his hind legs and his forelegs off the ground. His back socks are white, and so is the small patch on his forehead known as a star. With nothing else on the canvas, those marks read like a face.
The stallion behind the portrait
Whistlejacket was bred in 1749 in Northumberland, at the stud of Sir William Middleton. His sire was Mogul, a son of the famous Godolphin Arabian. After a few seasons of wins in the north of England, he lost two of his three races on his first visit to Newmarket, the center of English racing, in 1756. Middleton then sold him to Rockingham.
His great day came in August 1759 at York, in a match race against a horse called Brutus, owned by a Mr Turner. The stake was 2,000 guineas. Whistlejacket won by a length, ridden by the jockey John Singleton, and never raced again. Rockingham retired him to stud at Wentworth, the family estate in Yorkshire. No record says when he died.
A painter named Ozias Humphry, who knew Stubbs, told a story about the portrait. According to him, the live stallion caught sight of the painted one and began to "stare and look wildly at the picture, endeavouring to get at it, to fight and to kick it," until Stubbs stopped him with his palette and mahlstick.
The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon thinks the story was probably made up. Humphry, he notes, "had a habit of embroidering the truth," and it seems unlikely that Stubbs painted so large a canvas out of doors.
The tale also echoes one the Roman writer Pliny the Elder told about the Greek painter Zeuxis, whose painted grapes drew birds. It shows how quickly legends gathered around this canvas.
Another legend was written down in 1772 by the writer Horace Walpole, who saw the picture in Rockingham's house. He noted it as "large as life, fine, no ground done," meaning no background, and added that it "was to have had a figure of George 3d until Lord Rockingham went into opposition." Walpole read the empty ground as an unfinished picture and a king who never arrived. The evidence against both is much smaller than a king.
What You'll Discover
Whether a king was meant to ride him.
What the shadows under his hooves reveal.
What Stubbs learned from dead horses.
How the painting reached London.