This self-portrait is painted using enamels on a ceramic plaque created by the pottery manufacturer, Josiah Wedgwood. The enamel colours were ‘fired’ (baked) to fix them on the pottery support in the hope that the colours would be more vivid and enduring than with oil painting. Stubbs spent years experimenting with these techniques. However, they were dismissed by a contemporary critic as a ’hobby-horse’.

Stubbs’s image perhaps suggests a sense of pride about his sturdy physical demeanour and his technical abilities.

This is a very rare example of the kind of portraits that Stubbs painted to make a living in the early part of his career. In the 1740s and 1750s, he travelled to several towns and cities in the north of England looking for work.

The subject of this picture was a thirty-three year old gentleman from Lathom, in Lancashire; the date of the picture, 1755, appears on the back of the canvas. Stubbs returned to his native town of Liverpool in 1756-7.

This highly unusual painting was created for the Prince of Wales (later George IV), who commissioned a number of pictures from Stubbs in the 1790s. In 1793 the Prince was made the Colonel Commandant of the regiment whose members are shown here, and this picture was presumably made to commemorate the event. The pristine costumes and formal poses of the soldiers create a curious sense of artifice when combined with the painter’s close attention to their individual facial features.

Like the similar painting of mares and foals in a landscape shown in this room, this painting presents a group of animals arranged carefully in a frieze-like composition. Here, there are three dogs with two bitches.

This picture was commissioned by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, one of the wealthy gentlemen who bought pictures from Stubbs at the beginning of his career as an animal painter.

This painting shows the family of the potter Josiah Wedgwood, who reclines under a tree to the right. The vase on the table is an example of his famous ‘black basalt’ ware. Wedgwood’s technical innovations and marketing methods made him the most famous and successful pottery manufacturer of the time.

Stubbs and Wedgwood spent years trying to perfect a method of painting in enamels on ceramic supports. Several paintings in this room are painted on Wedgwood plaques.

This painting is a later copy of a picture commissioned by Lord Torrington, showing workmen on his estate at Southill. Stubbs often repeated compositions.

According to notes by Stubbs’s friend Ozias Humphry: ‘Mr Stubbs was a long time loitering about observing the old Men . . . till at length they fell into a dispute about the manner of putting the tail piece into the Cart’. He then sketched the scene and later got the men to pose for him in order to finish the picture.

This is one of at least ten compositions of brood mares and foals nearly all dating from the 1760s.

Although his scientific researches into horse anatomy enabled Stubbs to paint the horses here with convincing naturalism, this group follows a carefully constructed rhythmic design. The long format and the precisely balanced composition evoke a classical frieze.

This painting is a characteristic example of the kind of horse portraits that Stubbs made his speciality in the 1760s. It shows a horse owned by Lord Bolingbroke, who was one of his most important patrons at this time.

The format of the painting is simple, even simplistic. But the precision with which Stubbs describes the outline of the horse was quite new. Instead of presenting a stereotypical view of the animal, his painting seems to show a living creature, full of personality.