GEORGE STUBBS
Tygers at Play.

Etching, 1780. 378x480 mm; 14⅞x189⅞ inches, wide margins. Third state (of 4). Partial eagle (?) watermark. Published by the artist, London. A very good, early impression with strong contrasts and little to no sign of wear.

We have found only one other lifetime impression like the current work at auction in the past 30 years. Lennox-Boyd 60.

Although Stubbs (1724-1806) is most well-known for his paintings of horses and portraiture, he was also an accomplished printmaker. According to Richard Godfrey, in his essay George Stubbs as a Printmaker published in Fearful Symmetry: George Stubbs, Stubbs taught himself etching early in his career, illustrating John Burton's An Essay Towards a Complete New System of Midwifery (1751) and his own The Anatomy of a Horse (1766). He realized that printmaking could be lucrative and raise his profile as an artist. Later, while Stubbs had not exhibited a painting from 1782 to 1786, he was occupied by twelve plates which reinterpreted scenes or details of his earlier paintings, which were ultimately published in May 1788. After experimenting in the techniques of stipple, aquatint, and soft-ground etching, all of which were introduced to British printmakers in the 1760s and 1770s, Stubbs' printed works became remarkable in their gentle tonality and meticulous anatomical details present in his painted ouevre. The demand for Stubbs' printed works during the artist's lifetime were such that only a few impressions were printed, contributing to the scarcity of his prints found on the market today.

Although the subjects of Tygers at Play are leopards, and Stubbs would have been familiar with the distinctions between the species, historian Leslie Parris, in George Stubbs A.R.A. 'Leopards at Play' and 'The Spanish Pointer', concluded, "An explanation of Stubbs' indiscriminate use of the work 'tyger', which he seems to have employed in some generic sense, is still needed." Other scholars posit that the word "tiger" was commonly used as late as 1785 as a blanket term for large cats classified under the genus Felis tigris.