Zebra

Stubbs kept this canvas in his own possession until his death. The museum’s record identifies its subject as a female Cape mountain zebra brought from Africa to London in 1762 by a British warship and given to Queen Charlotte — the first zebra seen in England, as an earlier title for the picture states — and notes that Stubbs, whose fame rested on his horse portraits, worked from direct observation of the animal. The setting is the artist’s invention, differing from both the grasslands of her natural habitat and the paddocks of the royal menagerie where she spent the final decade of her life. The work is dated 1763, the same decade as the lion-and-horse series, and it came to the museum with the Paul Mellon collection.