George Stubbs Haymakers 1785

Nine farm workers (four men, three women and two horses) are stylishly posed against the backdrop of a pale blue summer sky full of wispy white clouds and framed by a majestic oak. The open fields and distant hills fade away to the hazy lower right [1], drawing the eye past a graceful rustic tableau. The characters are carefully positioned in three groups, their unexpected elegance gentrifying the humble bucolic scene. On the left two implausibly but impeccably dressed women, all frills and finery, caress newly mown hay with long-handled wooden rakes, poised in delicate hands and projecting diagonally towards the waiting cart, where a bare-headed man gathers in from his colleague’s pitchfork. The central group of three is organized vertically. The workers’ upright stance, farm implements and extended limbs accentuate the provocative, hand-on-hip pose of an elegant young woman, who affects the iconic pretensions of a Roman goddess or a mediaeval martyr [2]. The final group, horizontally displayed on the right, consists of one and a bit horses or in racing parlance ‘one length and a neck’. The lead horse is beautifully portrayed, its features captured by an artist intimately familiar with equine anatomy—coat gleaming, ears pricked, eyes blinkered, heroic patience worthy of a study in itself. The location is not known. It may be England’s South Midlands or the countryside around London [3]. The painting is likely based on drawings made ‘on site’ then worked up in the studio [4]. Stubbs sets his ‘heroic’ workers centre stage like civic dignitaries creating a ‘feel-good vision of the countryside, made to order for the gentry’ [5], a ‘proletariat conversation piece’ [1]. It is signed ‘Geo: Stubbs pinxit 1785’.

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