# Lion Devouring a Horse [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [STUBBS, George]() - Date: 1751-1800 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 69 x 104 cm ## Commentary The young George Stubbs made a journey to Rome in 1754. He was already known as a painter of animals, and his earliest biographer recorded his failure to make the usual studies of classical monuments. But the suggestive power of one antiquity in particular, a pre-Hellenistic sculpture of a horse attacked by a lion in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, moved him to his own depiction of fear. For thirty years Stubbs meditated on this theme of conflict, producing at least seventeen works in oil or enamel, clay or mixed-method engraving, adopting an episodic, four-part sequence beginning with the horse's first terrified sight of the lion emerging from its cave and ending - closest to the Antique source - with its exhausted collapse beneath its attacker. The picture shows this last episode. ## Related artworks - [A Dark Bay Thoroughbred in a Landscape]() - [Bird]() - [Haymaking]() - [King Charles Spaniel]() - [Man]() - [Portrait of a Dark Brown and White Newfoundland Spaniel]() - [The Milbanke and Melbourne Families]() - [The Pointer]() - [Two Bay Hunters in a Paddock]() - [Whistlejacket]() - [William Anderson with Two Saddle-horses]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()