The White Fire of Stubbs at the Frick

The British artist and natural scientist George Stubbs (1724–1806) is best known for his portraits of horses. Treating them like dignitaries, he posed the horses alone, in groups, or with their proud owners, grooms, or riders, standing or prancing in gray voids without context or scenery, or set against the idyllic backdrops of their masters' country estates. Inspired by ancient classical sculpture, Stubbs also painted horses — their veins and muscles straining and their tails and manes like white fire — being attacked and devoured by lions in the wild.

The Frick Collection has mounted the first New York museum exhibit of the artist's work, "George Stubbs (1724–1806): A Celebration." Organized by Colin Bailey and Denise Allen, the show of 17 British-owned paintings is divided into two galleries, one with pictures of animals and one with pictures of animals with people, presenting us with some of the artist's best works and an almost full range of his approach to his subjects.

At the Frick we find none of Stubbs's life-size portraits of horses (the Frick's temporary exhibition galleries are too small) or of those, such as "Whistlejacket" (c. 1762) from London's National Gallery, in which a rearing stallion is isolated in a gray field of nothingness. But on hand are portraits of a monkey, of a prize ox and his owner, and of a moose; as well as paintings of a lion and lioness, of lions attacking stags, and of dogs, for which Stubbs was also well known.

If naïveté can be charming, then Stubbs can certainly be a charmer. His pictures — somewhere between the folk art of Grandma Moses and the Hudson River School landscapists — convey a love and knowledge of nature and of animals, especially dogs and horses.

But Stubbs's pictures, as appealing as they can be, generally lack essential life, pictorial space, and rhythm. Of a place and time, they often feel as if they belong above the mantles in gentlemen's clubs or in noblemen's country estates; and they come nowhere near conveying the energy and life experienced in the paintings of horses by earlier, contemporary, or later European masters such as Rubens, Géricault, Delacroix, and Franz Marc. Stubbs's reliance on excessive details — the lustrousness of a horse's coat or the musculature and bone structure of an animal — betrays the fact that he was largely self-taught.

Stubbs is also famous for his unprecedented treatise "The Anatomy of a Horse" (1766), a detailed, illustrative book culled from two years spent dissecting horses in a farmhouse in the north of England. And Stubbs's animals can feel inanimate, as if they were drawn from taxidermy. The horse in the portrait "Molly Longlegs" (1762) is mechanical, as are the ox, rooster, and owner in "The Lincolnshire Ox" (1790). At times, as in "A Horse Frightened by a Lion" (1770), the animals are melodramatic and over-articulated. Everything is in its place (except, oddly, when it isn't), but there is no real sense of integration — of all of the parts adding up to a living being, let alone a living composition.

The two best works in the George Stubbs exhibit are the Tate's "Haymakers" and "Reapers" (both 1785), in which animals and figures are set working together in the British countryside. What sets these pictures apart is that they have a near-uniformity of light. Also, more so than in any of the other works on view, the figures, horses, and dog feel more natural and are more fused with the landscape. There are the beginnings of a rhythmic tumbling across their friezelike scenes, which enliven the settings and the action.

Still, even these two works, as sweet as they are, feel somewhat concocted, as if each figure or tree were painstakingly created outside the painting and then added to the picture as needed. Of course paintings are invented, but those inventions must be believable. A painted world, no matter how straightforward or fantastical, must come into being.

In Stubbs's paintings, the figures — whether human or animal — can feel static and unnaturally staged in the foreground, almost as if they had been cut and pasted onstage scenery. His figures are like self-conscious actors aware of their parts, waiting for the artist to tell them to take a break and to put down their props, and his animals seem anxious to get back to their normal lives beyond the imaginary world of the picture. In "Reapers," even the erotic metaphors of the composition, in which a woman stands before a man on horseback at the center of the painting and suggestively holds two splayed bundles of wheat in front of her own legs, are telegraphed and overtly symbolic.

Stubbs's animal pictures do offer a certain kind of pleasure, and the Frick's charming exhibition does justice to its subject. But Stubbs is not the greatest-ever painter of the horse, as some art historians would have us believe. The Frick has numerous masterpieces in its permanent collection that give us so much more than can be found in Stubbs's animals, landscapes, and figures. In Rembrandt's "The Polish Rider," man, beast, and landscape are rhythmically intertwined, giving horse and rider a sense of indecisiveness, movement, and inwardness. And in "The Sermon on the Mount," Claude Lorrain integrates figures, animals, light, and landscape, imbuing the scene with a delicacy that is as humble as it is miraculous. I suggest that, after you have seen Stubbs's delightful pictures, you go upstairs at the Frick and spend some time with paintings such as these.

Until May 27 (1 E. 70th St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-288-0700).