ABSTRACT
Many of George Stubbs's paintings convey the awareness that powerful people are lurking out of view, exerting control over both the canvases and the scenes they represent. Stubbs passed the next four decades prolifically at work, taking commissions mainly from the Rockingham Whigs but also, in the 1790s, from the Prince of Wales. Stubbs's paintings of social observation were shadowed by versions of connected themes in a more mythical vein. 'The Prince of Wales's Phaeton' was prefigured by pictures of Phaeton in his chariot about to be struck down by a thunderbolt, the horses shrill with terror. The painting is full of observations about what it is for people and animals to be placed in structures of power. Stubbs himself had had horses gripped in claw-like hooks and skinned them with tooth-sharp knives; he fed off horses all his life.
