A Body For Stubbs
Channel: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Date: 27/03/2024

6 March 2024

A Paul Mellon Centre Research Seminar by Iris Moon, Associate Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This talk focuses on the relationship between the painter George Stubbs and the potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood, and the work Reapers (1795). Alongside his commercial work making horse pictures for the landed gentry, Stubbs set out to create pictures of a more experimental nature executed on atypical surfaces, among them the oval ceramic tablets that Wedgwood created for him on demand. These were of an unusually large size, equally difficult to paint on, and fire in the kiln. Why was the horse painter drawn to the potter’s platters? Based on new material from Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024), this talk questions traditional readings of Wedgwood and the heritage paintings of Stubbs and, more broadly, notions of the eighteenth century as a foundational moment in Britain’s rise as a global commercial, financial and industrial power. At the centre of this revisionist story is capitalism, empire and exploitation. Found there too are babies, women, animals and ceramics, among other lost figures not usually at the centre of eighteenth-century British art. Stubbs and Wedgwood take on new meanings when seen through the twisted prism of our own moment, amidst the ruins of late capitalist modernity.