A Zebra, 1763 by George Stubbs
Canvas Print - 11615-STG

Stripes first. Before anything else, the eye lands on that extraordinary run of black and white bands – tightening across the shoulder, fanning over the haunch, breaking into finer chevrons along the face. George Stubbs painted them with the patience of a naturalist and the touch of a portraitist, each stripe following the curve of muscle beneath, so the animal's anatomy asserts itself through the pattern rather than being obscured by it.

She stands almost in profile on a patch of pale, sunlit earth, ears pricked backward, one delicate hoof lifted just slightly off the ground. That small gesture tells you everything about her state of mind. She is alert, uncertain, listening. This is a Cape mountain zebra brought by warship from southern Africa in 1762 and presented to Queen Charlotte, and Stubbs – who had already dissected horses in a Lincolnshire barn for his great anatomical treatise – studied her from life with the same forensic attention.

The forest around her is pure invention. No African grassland here, no royal paddock either, but an English-feeling wood of oaks and beeches, their canopies heavy in olive and umber. A pale trunk on the left rises like a column, its bark scraped with silvery lichen, and behind the zebra the middle distance dissolves into a mossy, greenish gloom. Light falls from the upper left, catching the top of her back and the crown of her head, then pooling on the ground beneath her belly. The rest is shadow, deep and cool, with that particular damp-woodland hush you can almost smell – wet leaf, bark, loam.

Compositionally, Stubbs sets her broadside to us, monumental against the trees, the way he would later pose a thoroughbred stallion for its owner. Think of Whistlejacket, all rearing gold against nothing. Here the strategy is inverted: a small, exotic creature made larger by isolation, dwarfed only by the scale of the leaves overhead, which quietly remind us how modest she really is.

What lingers, perhaps, is the mismatch. She belongs to sunlit veld, and Stubbs has placed her in a northern European reverie, half menagerie curiosity, half woodland spirit. He kept the painting, A Zebra, until his death – which suggests he knew he had made something more than a zoological record. The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, USA now holds her, and standing in front of the canvas one senses the strange tenderness in Stubbs's gaze: an animal thousands of miles from home, painted by a man who understood, better than almost anyone in eighteenth-century Britain, how to look.