 Felly ei wneud. Felly rydyn ni sy'n ffrif yn fawr am y ddamerlu Paul Mellan, mae'r ddeud yn Sartodaeth Brydgrifau. Rydyn ni'n bod hi'n gael bynnag gweithio hwn arlaff, ac mae'n gael y gafodd arlaffol i'r ddug. A'r rhaid i'n gwybod fod yn gweithio ar y ddeud, o Manolir Ierysg, a byddio amser yng Nghymru'r Sehmalol yma, chi'n ei gydag y bodi nesaf, a yna yn gweithio'r newid, y cwmdd y bobl melancholi wedi'u gweld a fewn i'r ffordd, cyffredinol, ac mae'r rhaglenu'r rhaglenu i'r gweithio Gwyrd Gwyrdd George Stubbs a'r pota'r gweithio Gwyrdd Gwyrdd Gwyrdd Gwyrdd Gwyrdd. Yn y ffrifoedd yw'r gweithio, mae'r 1795, ac mae'n gweithio'r gweld yma, y gweithio'r gweld yma, Now in the collection of the Yale Centre for British Arts and bought by Paul Mellon for the collection in Newhaven at Yale University, I was thinking about this Iris, the relationship between the Mallons through Paul Mellon to purchasing that work, and his interest in stubs largely through horses and his interest in sporting art, but also at the Paul Mellon centre, yw'r relasiad wedi'u geisio yng Nghymru, a'r archif yng Nghymru yn y clywed. Felly, mae'r ffawr hynny'r hystoriograffau o'r stwb yw'r ffaith yw'r ysgol, mae'n fawr i'r gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio i'r fawr i'r gweithio i'r fawr i'r gweithio i'r gweithio i'r rŵm. Felly, mae'n gweithio i'r gweithio i'r gweithio eiser breaks material illoges deheadig yn cy leisure formed. Mindaewch i vicinity adael yrNIE yw Open mae nhw'n addysgu arall dyfodol, yn gyfanffir i'r adael yr hynny'n strategiaid. Yn y gallwch argymenni arwaf o'r ysgrif hon i arwag ar ymddiffyn yn y ohonoedd gweithio iawn iawn i gyllid yn yr ysgwrth yng ngypeth a gweithio arddangosol yn New York, yn y gallwch ei dwylo ysgrif yn y rhannu i Gaelad! Pan ddim yn effaith holl o dda not arwag Fan Ysgwrth yng Nghymru Passwyr! Felly mae'r gallwch yn llaw, yn yma ch tan maen nhw byddwch i'n llaw, a gbergwch ei ddeithasio hyn am fawr, Cyn rhaid i chi o'n siŵr ymarfer? Mae gofio o'r ffordd rhai i chi'n eu cyffredin gael Someone o'r ffirmiliaid, A rhai i chi oedd i chi eistedd latr concicio y rhai Ac rhaid i chi oedd nhw'n gwertho, Mae chi'n gwneud hyn yn cyffredinolohon Dim gael o bach gael agosliad. Rwy'n gwneud i chi'n gwneud unrhyw ddod A sydd ychydig ei gweithio'r material Yn hynny'n gwneud ar y cwmtemifice Mae'n dwy gynny'n cael cwm sut oedd i chi ar y Lund Til gweld i gael gweithio gwiaith yw byddwch a'r pwysig. Gwelwch i gael ei tun驷 rhywbeth i ddweud o'r poddiolieddau a llwnio. Ond fel allwn cwm yn gwybodaeth yng Nghymru i siaradau y gwir iawn i'r porffort yn ddod i'r Ffurdig Melon. Ddwy'n mynd i chi i, Sarah. Felly byddwn yn ddod yn y gallu gweld hi'r ffordd. It's truly a delight to be back here. Fi gyd i'r gweithio gwnaeth hynny, gweld i'r ffordd, ac mae'r fawr hynny'n gwybod yna, o'i gweithio wedi bod yn ymweld yn ddweud o'r cyd-dweud. Ond rydyn ni'n gweithio, dwi'n ddweud o'r cyfrifiad hwnnw, o'r cyfrifiad hwnnw, i'n ddweud o'r Llyfrgell Paul Mellancenter o'r grwp yma yng Nghymru mewn gwirioneddau, i'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, oedd yna'r cyfrifiad hwnnw, oedd wedi'i gweithio'r cyfrifiad hwnnw, mae'n dweud i'r bod yn hwnnw'n gweithio. Felly o'r byddau, dyma'n cerdd, yw'r materio ar y llaw y Llywodraeth, sy'n ddod o'r cyfrifio wedi un o'r cyfrifio wedi'i cyfrifio'r llaw y George Stubb. Mae'n gwisgol o'r ysgrifennu sy'n ddiddordeb yma sy'n gwneud ysgrifennu'r llaw y Google Books sy'n ddiddordeb yma, ond mae'n ddiddordeb yn ddiddordeb? Roeddwn digwydd. Sheila ac eu gweld ar y Fwyrdd Gweithio yn y Ysgrifennu Gwasanaeth yng Nghymru, ac yn Ysgrifennu Gwyrdd George Stubbs yw'r gweithfyrdd yma yn ddod. Mae'r gweithfyrdd Paul Mellon, gyda gweithfyrdd ac ymddorol yng Nghymru, yn ddod i'r llaw o Gweithfyrdd Travertine bydd yn Lwyddoedd Llewyddoedd, yn ymgyrch ynghylch, yn ddod i'r gweithfyrdd Gweithfyrdd, gyda'r gweithfyrdd Cwyrdd. Sheila yna yn Gweithfyrdd, yna yn Branford, ond rydyn ni'n gweithio'r llwyddoedd. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r llwyddoedd sy'n gweithio'r llwyddoedd sy'n gweithio'r llwyddoedd, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r llwyddoedd, a'r llwyddoedd Bryddoedd. Stubb sy'n gweithio'r llwyddoedd yn all three of those categories, sometimes in the same canvas. He despised being called a horse painter, prefering the more noble sanding, Animalier. Exiting the elevator doors on the fourth floor, Stubb's his reapers immediately catches our attention. An ofal sleis of the English countryside set into a thick gold frame, the painting is bigger than a serving platter. It depicts a scene of harvesting in the shallow foreground of a field. The four figures to the left collect wheat as a man in a brown coat on a chestnut horse. Watch us from the right of the composition. Visible in the distance is a church steeple, with the label suggesting that the painting is an allegory of work. To work is to pray. To two men in the center stoop and swoop with sickles, reaping their way across the dense field of gold wheat. No sweat beads their brows and their white linen shirts and off white breeches stay pristine. To their left a dog sitting next to a barrel and a jug has just raised its head to look at the man on the horse, while a woman and a man bundle the crops. They pause for a moment to look up at the horse rider who wears a plain coat with shiny leather boots to match and an easy smile. The horse's slightly speckled rump glistens in the sun. The rider has just said something to them. They haven't yet answered. Haste is not a part of this picture thick with timelessness, meant to recall a much older constellation of images of harvesting and bounty, from books of hours showing the medieval laborers in the fields to Peter Broigle the Elder's scenes of peasants at work and rest. In the Flemish masters version, a great sweep of land is shown by the path that loops through the composition, connecting the far hill replete with wheat to the partially cold field, with the workers taking a rest by a large tree. The painting famously pushed the reminders of religion far to the back of the composition, focusing instead on the secular vision of work, rest and sustenance. In the foreground, the peasants guzzle, slurp and chomp their victuals with one man slicing a large wheel of cheese. Another wearing a hat stirs off into space, rapturous at his filled belly, while yet another slumbers limbs a kimbo. The landscape is expansive and loopy, a peasant geometry that fills up the whole canvas, so that distance is measured in terms of hunger, work and rest, not piety. If you roll the wheel of cheese down the path, it would probably take a month to reach the bottom of the hill. In contrast with the great swoosh of land in Broigle, Stubbs compresses his harvest into an intimate composition. He forecloses the middle ground into a narrow strip of wheat, whereas the Flemish painter's landscape leaves it wide open. Known for making freeze-like compositions, Stubbs pushes his figures far into the foreground, cutting off our view of what lies between the field and the church in the back of the painting. It's a pressure cooker of space compounded by the oval format. Behind the writer's hat, the sun pierces the dark cluster of trees on a late summer's day, when the air crackles with heat and is speckled with tiny bits of pollen and insects. There is some tension across the arrangement of figures. Am I just imagining it, or is the woman bonding a sheaf of wheat, clenching her hands so tightly that her knuckles are white? Come close and there are cracks. I see one in the clouds that runs from the top left of the oval to the bottom right quadrant. Sheila beckons me closer and says, look, across the man's back, there's another one and it runs all the way across. It slices in a T across his brown coat and down to the right, sectioning the horse's rump and the neat bundle of hay that terminates the right arc of the painting's edge. This is where Wedgwood materializes. You don't see him at first, but he's there in the cracks that appear across Stubbs's broken landscape of labour on the body as a ceramic grounds for his paintings. Now you know this is a picture of a fiction, an image of what never was. So this is the crack that I'm referring to right here. Stubbs painted reapers in 1795 using the last of the clay tablets that had been produced for him at Atreuria in the year that its founder, Wedgwood, died. Building upon his obsession with painting enamel on copper, Stubbs sought out larger and larger surfaces on which to apply the experimental pigments that he produced at great expense and endless labour. He had already approached Eleanor Code, the famous entrepreneur of the artificial sculpting and architectural material known as Codestone, but to no avail. Mrs Code had coolly informed him that her stoneware was not fit for painting. Stubbs then turned to Thomas Bentley. This is not her, obviously. This is Elizabeth made out of Codestone. Sorry. You'll all notice that there are no labels. It was intentional. I know. I'm being a bad art historian. Stubbs then turned to Thomas Bentley who managed a ceramic showroom in London who passed on his inquiry to Atreuria. Wedgwood initially expressed reservations to his partner. Quote, T trays were very hazardous things to make and I cannot promise their success. End quote. But from 1775 until the 1780s, at the same time as he was experimenting with Jasper Ware, Wedgwood would work to develop for Stubbs a large, thin and even surface that would take enamel paint without warping or buckling. Whereas the fickle and unwieldy Jasper Ware presented problems for Wedgwood in terms of its inconsistency and impermanence, his experiments on behalf of Stubbs posed the problem of firing at monumental scales that defyde the typical norms of ceramic objects. Only a few of these large tablets were made and the enigmatic painter would use some of them to return to the subject of field work he had earlier explored in oil painting. For the artistic gatekeepers of the Royal Society, these were monstrous freaks because they pushed the boundaries of enamel painting reserved at that point for dainty formats to gargantua proportions. No matter how picturesque the depictions of labour offered by Stubbs' enamel painting they were seen by some as dinner plates put on the walls of a space reserved for high art. The first painting by Stubbs that struck Wedgwood's fancy was Labourers, displayed at the Royal Academy in 1779 and originally painted on behalf of Lord Torrington as an image of the men who worked for him. I tell Sheila that this was the other painting on ceramic that I wanted to see in Newhaven but knew it would be off limits to the public. From what I recalled Labourers was darker than Reapers and more cloaked in shadows. The last time I'd seen the painting was in 2020 when I'd been given a private viewing of the Newhaven conference room where Melon's fancy for Wedgwood ceramics is quietly kept out of sight of the public. I remembered how surprising it was to find Labourers displayed next to cases of Wedgwood jazz for wear plaques and porcelin figures of Dr Syntax. When Melon donated his collection to Yale University and founded the Centre for British Art, it was expressly stipulated that it should not collect decorative arts which confers a hint to the forbidden on any soup-son of the decorative arts in Khan's concrete building, Wedgwood included. The plaque featuring the Labourers dwarfs and scale the ceramics in the display cases. Gone as a summer day in the rustle of wheat replaced instead with four men in rumpled clothes who look like characters in a Beckett play. Crap, crap, crap, and crap, let's say. In contrast to the syncopated rhythms of the wheat harvest out in the main galleries, here the men have paused to squabble around a cart being pulled by a workhorse with a large hound lying nearby. The master rider on horseback is nowhere to be found. Far from the dark and dense trees of the foreground is a house with pleasant proportions but a somewhat toothy dental cornice surrounded by a neat white fence. This is probably the men's ultimate destination given the bricks they load into the back of the cart. Work is stopped for there's no bricks in the carts only the pieces lying in shambles nearby. Here too is Wedgwood as a patron. The rustic version painted on canvas stopped him in his tracks when he saw it at the Royal Academy in 1779. So much so that he wrote to Bentley that he would have stubs do his family portrait instead of asking his friend Joseph Wright of Darby. Stubs in fact made several versions of this image. The original one painted for Lauren Torrington in 1767. The canvas exhibited in 1779. The enamel from 1781 that Wedgwood purchased and the prints that disseminated the images to a white audience beyond that of the Royal Academy. The narrative of stubs in Wedgwood's experiments have been naturalized as a facet of the Midlands Enlightenment the artist's exploitation of the quote emerging technology of the industrial revolution and quote to achieve immortality for his work was a gold shared and understood by the equally ambitious entrepreneur. In this respect the pairing of the preeminent horse painter to the aristocracy with a great purveyor of luxuries to the wealthy should not appear surprising. In an age of connectivity and networks of gentlemen's clubs and the lunar society the historical narratives of the period make it seem as if the meaning of these meeting of these great minds was inevitable. Oops sorry. In fact at a certain point stubs' self-portrait on a horse painted on a Wedgwood plaque was mistaken for Wedgwood himself. So closely aligned were the images that they became one and the same. And no other pair of producers during this period slipped so easily into the category of English heritage today with stubs in particular signifying the desire of quote being English not British or wanting to be English or wanting a prestige chunk of Englishness on your wall. And if none of that applies it is still the case that for lots of people stubs represents an English national heritage of supreme tastefulness and appeal as the designers of chocolate boxes, biscuit tins and other consumer vegetables have recognized. I found this on Etsy I think you can actually still buy this so it's pretty affordable. If stubs is recognized mostly for painting horses those list some symbols of landed wealth gambling and leisure his repeated reworking of labourers should tell us something about a self-taught artist whose visual memory de-centered the human body in order to trace horses animals amassing powerful muscles and sinewy limbs but also vulnerable prey. Holly Hawk's nat luster whistlejack Rob Pumpkin gymcrack turfon eclipse against the tide of horses racing to make money for their investors stubs kept coming back in the compositions of his own making to pictures of labour and work at times hard and slow meditative and quiet sometimes quizzical. The charge has been made that the leisurely depiction of work was never enough in the eyes of leftist art historians to clear stubs' name from the charge of supporting an aristocratic agenda listen to John Berger, for instance who complained of his animal canvases quote paintings of animals not animals in their natural condition but livestock whose pedigree is emphasized as a proof of their value and whose pedigree emphasizes the social status of their owners animals painted like pieces of furniture with four legs end quote I don't entirely disagree with Berger's assessment but stubs' painting on Wedgwood is weird and their visions are not always aligned on the same goal when I first thought about writing on stubs I thought this was going to be about juxtaposing his images of horses and fields with what was described once as the quote ideology of landscape and a quote where paintings of rustic pastures helped to naturalize the process of enclosing common land and taking it into private ownership and how this process took place in lockstep with the entrepreneurial extraction of the common resources of the midlands starting with the construction of the Trenton Mercy canal the first long distance canal in England and one of the quote great agents of modernity built to unleash all the dynamism of the industrial revolution end quote as one historian put it and of course you know Wedgwood had a hand in the Trenton Mercy canal so that it would specifically cut right through y trwria so that's something to keep in mind Wedgwood himself had lobbied for and supported this engineered waterway which connected the port of Liverpool with its access to global markets to the landlocked pottery towns of Burslam Tunstall and Stoke but when I encountered reapers again in New Haven this is not what came to me at all I didn't think about landed gentry the enclosure of the commons or canals slicing through the midlands but instead I kept seeing the tight and almost suffocating compression of the foreground a bubble of airless space that brought the reapers close to me and the weird tension of picturing labour as cooked space on a platter for that's what this is Stubbs's paintings on Wedgwood are examples of what have been described as art made in the age of combustibles when fire and chemistry were the determinants in making of British aesthetics the art historical focus for the most part been on Joshua Reynolds the academician par excellence whose canvases of eminent and illustrious faces quickly became ravaged by his experiments with caustic media defined by their impermanence and alterability Stubbs, horse painter barely registers even though he was the one who sought to make paintings permanent almost in direct opposition to Reynolds by serving them on a platter cooked in Josiah's kilns but more than this competitive world of science I wanted to know what Stubbs saw in Wedgwood's bodies and why he wanted to paint this picture on a ceramic plate and what he saw there that was so different from copper panel, paper or canvas he'd used these other surfaces to considerable acclaim but ceramics, no way Judy Edgerton believes that Clay cost Stubbs his accreditation with the Royal Academy was a danger to his reputation and his skills it lacked pedigree it lacked polish partly because it was already a body that lived in the world of commerce not higher art it belonged on the table, not the wall the Royal Academy striving so hard to establish painting as a liberal art developed a strong distaste for Stubbs' ceramic ovals the other thing I thought about when staring at Stubbs' oval paintings was birth what does it feel like it's the passage of a meteorite crashing through the eye of a needle when you're the body bearing the room intellect gives way to ferocious animal feeling and the force of bearing down and out of what's inside you there's no head, there's only body what nobody tells you about is a selective hearing and how the hollow of space nearest to your ears open and listening so if anyone's going to direct you with the next steps they will have to enter this airless bubble of space until the baby comes crashing out of you my metaphors are failing here instead what wells up are the pictures of Stubbs' horses being attacked by lions again and again in different postures and scenarios but the same feeling of total surrender and vulnerability on the one hand and in the same picture plane oops unbridled ferocity art historians love to use the word birth to describe the beginning of something of genius, of the modern of the new, of modernity of freedom but I wonder do they really know what birth feels like it fucking hurts babies not horses were among the first subjects of experimentation for self-taught Stubbs and around which the ovals appeared so that we have an uncanny convergence upon in the oven of an artist in gestation happening through an utero we don't know much about Stubbs' life reticent intense and heavy set he left very little in the way of archival evidence or personal records for the most part what we know about him comes from the conversations he had with fellow artist Ozaius Humphrey he was born in Liverpool like Wedgewood's partner Bentley the son of a courier a tradesman who dressed tanned hides preparing them for the fashioning trades that would turn them into usable leather goods such as reins, saddles and belts using urine as part of the process the work of the courier stinks Stubbs would have encountered the ships entering the great city port the mouth of the motherland feeding on the colonial expanses of the empire connecting them to the metropole he worked for his father until he was about 14 by which time he had already developed a keen interest in drawing and anatomy the young Stubbs tried and failed to apprentice to local portrait painters such as Hamlet Wyn Stanley copying the works of other painters was the standard way of learning but Stubbs did not do copies Humphrey relates that even at an early age the painter resolved to study directly from nature which brings us to Stubbs and the York County Hospital where he encountered John Burton the Jacobite doctor who would be eternally lampooned in Tristram Shandy as Dr Slop Papist and man midwife at the York Hospital Stubbs made his babies seeking to study anatomy he took up residence at the hospital founded by Burton in 1740 to treat poor patients and to function as a medical school far from providing palliative care the institution only admitted patients seeking surgery so what Stubbs would have encountered there was mostly quote cutting for the stone setting of broken bones and where necessary amputation end quote a quick learner Stubbs became a teacher of anatomy taking on students of his own and were procured for the young artist curious to study the sinews, muscles and limbs of the body at an intimate distance it said that his first dissection was of a hanged criminal it was the only way to study them with a stench of death hanging over the body the engraving Stubbs undertook to illustrate Burton's medical treatise an essay towards a complete new system of midwifery are one of the few records we have of the painter's time here published in 1751 the treatise promoted Burton's newly developed forceps as a method for delivery offering quote several new improvements whereby women may be delivered in the most dangerous cases with more ease, safety and expedition than by any other method here too for practiced and to pique the reader's interest Stubbs' illustrations unsigned were dangled on the frontus piece quote all drawn up and illustrated with several curious observations and 18 copper plates Stubbs recounted to his biographer the intense pressure he was under to provide the plates primarily because Burton was trying to steal a march on his rival William Smelly whose own much more influential treatise on the theory and practice of midwifery illustrated by Jan van Remstijk would be published one year later both men sought to publicize their respective developments on obstetric forceps instruments used to help in the delivery of complex and dangerous births such as breech babies which up until then had often led to the death of mother and child Sure doc, happy to make plates of dissected newborns Humphrey uncomfortable described these as quote fetuses, wombs, infant children etc etc etc no problem did I mention that I don't know how to engrave oops sorry Stubbs did not want to engrave the plates having no experience in printmaking and perhaps not a little daunted by the prospect of depicting such complex dissections at the age of 21 he later recalled that Burton quote wouldn't listen to excuses pressed upon him the undertaking insisting upon it end quote this is why he refused to sign the plates feeling that his first early undertakings in engraving in which he would become quite accomplished had taken place under duress and were very imperfect none the less he soldiered on using some of Burton's private patients for the plates for the other illustrations he relied upon the corpse of a woman who had died in childbirth which had been secretly smuggled by his anatomy students into York hospital quote where it was concealed in a garret and all the necessary dissections made end quote it was from such instances according to Edgerton that Stubbs gained his early vile renown tainted by his clandestine anatomy studies published a little over two decades before William Hunter's epic large format anatomical atlas of the uterus Burton's treatise is very much a working man's text portable and meant to be carried in a pocket or leather bag strapped to a horse the writing from a position of medical experience Burton was clearly indebted to but always correcting the received wisdom of practicing women midwives at the same time he bristled against the satires and rumours that were already circulating around him when the book appeared he dedicates the work to the members of the royal society in London and the medical society in Edinburgh though he confesses that he had not met most of these illustrious men in person he publishes the book in their name sharing the like-minded aim of propagating quote all beneficial knowledge to the world in general but more particularly that branch of it whereby the lives and healths of mankind are to be preserved end quote the book is let's see sorry the book is divided into four principal parts Burton begins with an anatomical and physical description of sorry and this is not Burton this is the Hunter book Burton begins with an anatomical and physical description of quote bones of the pelvis and their structure the true fabric and situation of the womb quote end quote based on the person that was opened after dying undelivered at her full reckoning end quote the next part focuses on the disorders of pregnancy and methods for treatment or the third section looks at methods of assisting women end quote preternatural labors with or without instruments end quote the final section looks at abortions Burton emphasises the importance of first-hand experience in delivering his theory of midwifery which he explains as quote end quote each description is paired with Burton's direct observations of his deliveries of women from all classes and situations in the vicinity of York County hospital some successful others less so but since the reader cannot witness the births he has attended he signals the usefulness of the copper plates noting quote judicious persons must be sensible that in describing objects not to be seen the reader will have a better idea of them from a true representation upon a plate than only from a bare description as is evident in all branches of philosophy Malthus' book on population is still some 50 years away but already you can picture the explosion of midwife treatises in the mid 18th century as feeding into a larger network of capitalist anxieties on population reproduction and resources the womb was of interest not only to medical professionals but to the economists who were calculating the nation's wealth based on life expectancies and the amount of potential labour to be exploited in its name in fact one could say that quote the birth of this timeline of capitalism depended upon the disciplining of the female body in making the sight of reproduction available to science in midwifery the lives and healths of mankind are to be preserved as Burton puts it the clock is ticking and labour while momentarily arrested here in the interests of picturing enlightenment knowledge is already being harnessed to production and national wealth the intervention of male midwives in the womb could also be read as an expression of a budding masculine anxiety about origins and the desire to lay claim to the sight of generation Ann McClintuck asserts that quote the fact of being deprived of a womb is the most intolerable deprivation of man since his contribution to gestation his function with regard to the origins of reproduction is hence asserted as less than evident as open to doubt end quote something of the old way of picturing the world of the womb as a mysterious space of female fluidity lingers on in Burton's texts and as channeled in Stubbs' plates it's helpful to compare Burton's modest texts with Hunter's much more ambitious volume to understand how they conceived of the woman's body oh sorry I want to head Hunter physician extraordinary to Queen Charlotte whom Stubbs would later encounter in his work on zoological anatomies dedicated his monumental atlas anatomy of the human gravate uterus to George III publishing the texts in Latin and English and using highly detailed illustrations to represent quote only what was actually seen end quote the objective of course was to familiarize medical students and practitioners of the obstetrics with the architecture of the womb Hunter's clinical language paired with incredibly visceral images of women's bodies rendered into pieces of flesh the secrecy of birth mapped, medicalized, graphically exposed and rendered traversable why else the phrase an anatomical atlas in contrast Burton's country doctor prose is practiced on the move with the plates intended to show exceptional births that prove difficult or even monstrous one of the most melancholy cases he writes is that of a child which is positioned correctly but quote cannot be brought forth either on account of the extraordinary size of its head or of any other parts being too large in proportion among the most disturbing images is table 17 which shows what Burton calls a monster Hunter would have preferred a medicalized term figure one represents a monster born without a head of which I delivered a woman in the city York in January 1749 in a view where part of the back and right side are shown with one hand and foot exactly drawn from nature the image shows a body in parts along with multiple instruments meant to help facilitate its passage from the inside of the body to outside there's a flustered quality to the mark making of the plates cross hatching gone willy nilly sometimes shaped to contour and define other times going off piece to become a piece of downy hair it's as if in being forced to illustrate parts of nature that he himself quite cannot quite process or understand stubs is trying to figure out not only the medium of engraving but how to depict these three dimensional alien forms half form beings that he's never seen alive on the surface of the flat page so far no preparatory drawings have been found the depiction of the womb and cross sections of course like all architectural renderings a fantasy an impossible viewpoint because we have to insert ourselves into a curved watery space that would never admit another close examination of the engravings reveals uneven cross hatching and a confused understanding of baby limbs floating in amniotic fluid in table 10 the composition of two wombs stacked on top of each other makes them resemble mirror images rather than two separate examples of birth positions the awkward eruption of the hand burdens at the bottom of the womb serving as a forceful reminder of what these representations entail the composition is not just a composition but presents a physical problem how will the baby contained in the misshapen oval get out table 16 shows a variety of tools intended to help deliver the baby safely but their shapes and oversize scale in relation to the womb make them appear more like weapons who will pull the footling breach out despite his impossible position who will unravel the umbilical cord safely it's very intense who will put the baby in the right position who will pull the baby out how will they get out I have to pause from looking at Burton's book it's an intense experience unfolding the pages to reveal the plates inserted at strategic moments of the text with instructions provided to the book binder for the observations on successful births are outweid by the complications that cannot be resolved by women traumatized and babies lost reading in the archive is supposed to be a contemplative activity for it's quiet like a church but I can feel my blood pressure rising and my heart pounding and it gets harder and harder to turn the pages I can't read anymore these are images of births gone wrong pictures of errors of body parts in the not right places and positions which Stubbs is being asked to memorialize over and over in the space of the printed page with tools he's using for the first time specialists in the works of Stubbs the painter of prestige chunks of England like to ignore or forget these early plates they have been described as grungy ugly and grubby little prince expressions unveiling more than a hint of chauvinistic disgust at the picturing of the secret space of a woman's inside an architecture of interiority an architecture of interiority inaccessible no matter how much the doctors of the 18th century sought to force the hand of their engravers to open up the wound to the panoptic medical gaze Burton and his more successful rival smelly included try as you might you'll never know what it feels like to go back to the womb but Stubbs has carved out an indelible space on the page for the womb so that one scene they cannot be forgotten for our own purposes these illustrations point to the site of the oval as a primal scene for Stubbs a cooked space born from pressure to which the painter returned again and again in a sort of repetition compulsion in his compositions made on Wedgwood tablets this prehistory provides an alternative context for reading his paintings on ceramic and the psychical investments they contained Stubbs did not often return to the subject of babies after this early experience on the Burton text in the midst of pictures of sublime terror of horse against lion of fate in driving his father's chariot to disastrous consequences of muscles and men and adrenaline the mature Stubbs made a momentary return to depict a mother and child in a circular format of copper on enamel where it's unclear whether the child is alive or dead not much has been written on the straightened painting from 1774 Edgerton hesitates on the iconography for this enamel as well as another entitled hope nursing love dismissing the possibility that these images represented his partner Mary Spencer with their son George Townley Stubbs since the latter was already in his 20s at this time nonetheless the impulse to find a place for these babies within an autobiographical context demonstrates just how much of a painterly aberration they were in the arc of the animalier's career thank you I knew I shouldn't have worn mascara I know we might have questions on the line as well my colleague Rebecca is going to look out for those for us but thank you so much Iris because I think you probably took us all to unexpected places and that was really I was just sort of watching and listening and that journey through time and space was quite unexpected for me anyway and just made me think about Stubbs in ways that I haven't done before so thank you for that because it just felt raw and we obviously could see that for you as well and reminds us that our writing our careers our reflections are not divorced from our own circumstances and acts of genesis books and babies and families and life all of these are entangled for many people so anyway I just wanted to say thank you for that because it was it was very moving and just fantastic to feel that process of writing and reflecting with you and it did make me think in different ways about Stubbs and Space because it's actually a work that you showed which again I know because it's in the Yale Centre for British Art Collection I think it's called is it the robbing down house at Newmarket where you've got these the structure of that building and then so much space so much sky and I've always thought that to be these compositions are always the strangeness the weirdness of the relationship between either exactly and obviously in Whistlejacket there's a lot of thinking there about the relationship between body and space but I think it was a phrase you used about the pressure cooker of the space in the reapers so sometimes it's incredible containment and then the contrast of vastness so there's this kind of I don't know this play that Stubbs is working on through composition and it just really made me think about these different formats and what's happening but there's something about the Stubbs and Space which then seeing it through this container of the womb space and Midwifery just really got me thinking about that but can you tell us more about how you arrived at this chapter where that came from just kind of set the scene for us a bit there? Sure, is this on? Yes, so I've never done a reading of this chapter in particular and it was like wow really I think when you read it out loud you're sort of back into that space speaking of space in Stubbs well for me I mean the entire book is very much coloured by a subjective take on everything right? I mean in this sort of promotional material I call it an experimental biography and it's like well what does that even mean but for me I was interested in this idea of a biography is always about more than one person right? I mean we tend to sort of assume that's about a sort of single timeline from birth to death but that timeline of birth to death is so interwoven with so many different people and you know I wondered if it was possible to kind of change the composition a little bit so you know the book is equally about Wedgwood but also inheritance right? I mean the second generation but it's also about me in a way I mean not to foreground that but just to say you know my version of Wedgwood cannot be the same as others and I really wanted to be honest about that from the beginning but with Stubbs I think I've always really loved his paintings but I never really knew what to do with them because they're like horse paintings and I don't really know like that's a very alien subject to me you know I mean well first like a ceramics person you know I do stuff on plates and cups and saucers and and you're right there's a sense there's a management of space in his horse paintings that's so much about a vastness but also about a weird kind of sense that they're artificial right I mean you would never go into a field and see this perfect portrait of a horse right sort of standing there and so there are these incredible combinations of stillness vastness but also right I mean horses are all about that kind of muscular agility and tension and you know that moment that they spring from the gate you know and so there's always that underlying sense of a kind of ferocity but also a sort of vulnerability and they are pure muscle you know it's like and I don't know like I was just always sort of interested in trying to find a way to talk about Stubbs and he's such a weird painter and I mean Wedge was also kind of weird but weird in the sense that we tend to take for granted that we know everything about them. I like that weirdness in like not knowing what to do. Yes you know that again that's sort of how to encounter these artists again. Yeah and I was so surprised when I went to the Morgan Library and I saw the Burton Midwiff and Judy I'm so glad that you mentioned Judy Edgerton because that book is like amazing. I mean she's such a phenomenal Stubbs scholar and there's a great sensitivity to him as an artist that I mean for a catalogue raisiner you're like oh my god this is like amazing to the amazing project. Such an amazing project and it's so and she talks about the midwifery treatise with a great deal of sensitivity but also kind of like I don't really know what to do with this because it's sort of the aberration right and I was interested in the I mean the whole book is about aberrations things that don't fit in right and I was like well has anyone actually looked at this book and tried to figure out what to do with it and so I had seen it at the Morgan Library and then I went to the Mellon Centre in New Haven to look at the paintings again on the Wedgewood platters and I was like oh is there some kind of connection here between because I think what's so great about Stubbs is that on the one hand we think of him as this kind of boring traditional horse painter right like heritage but on the other hand he was incredibly experimental I mean the fact that he went to Wedgewood was like make me a giant platter that I can paint on you know very specifically and I mean that's a kind of very interesting aspect to him that I was sort of I wanted to mine a little bit but you know I'm not a paintings person, I'm not a Stubbs specialist by any means but I found him to be a very compelling character in a lot of ways yeah Fantastic, oh I can already see hands being raised so Malcolm I saw yours first Thank you, that was wonderful absolutely and truly powerful I was very struck by how you spoke about that object and made it so unsettling but there were two aspects that I think one if we think of ceramic objects or ceramic images we think of them often having a border and that's sort of lacking, I'm not sure whether the frame it's in original frame or I don't know I think it might be so it does have a border in a sense but not the border that you would expect I'm thinking of things like the most painted enamel there's a very elaborate language border and so on the second thing is the sort of wider issue about the relationship between the fine arts and the decorative arts and even those of us who have been for years involved with the decorative arts as well as the fine arts still have a sort of divide in our head I've experienced this with Rubiliac who very early on there's a record that one of his monuments the relief was going to be in Chelsea porceliff and it wasn't and I've always rather separated out the attempts to attribute ceramics to Rubiliac and I think I'm probably wrong about that and it's because I've somehow internalised this familiar divide and what you've done is to really protest and think that from a different point of view is what I too No, I completely agree with you and thank you so much for that comment and I think you're right and I also have that kind of internalised division that the flat art is the fancier stuff and the stuff that sits on the table is the less fancy the 3D stuff and I wonder I'm sure it's like a part of the sort of historiography of art and history and whatnot but you do wonder when that internalised division happened and I do think maybe it was a part of that 18th century moment when the academy was trying to assert itself as this authoritative body and they could not they could not accept someone who was trying to push this medium in a new direction and I think Stubbs never really I mean from what I understand never really decide to go back to the academy after he had that horrible episode where he tried to hang his enamel paintings and you know they sort of were like no we're not doing this but yeah the internalised division I think is a really interesting one and certainly something that I was trying to grapple with as well so thank you, thank you so much Thank you Iris who knew you took us so wonderfully from the oval form of the etched wombs to the oval form of the platter suggesting that was a sort of primal moment as it were for Stubbs and I wonder whether you found there was any discussion in the 18th century of a connection at the level of subject matter between what we now call the labour of the woman bringing a child into the world and the labour of the fields the agrarian farm labour of the fields, question one and question two is I just wondered whether there were other artists besides Stubbs who painted on these large flat surfaces for Wedgewood or was this a unique production from the Wedgewood standpoint? Yeah that's two, Susan that's the best questions so I think to the first question I don't recall that being a part of the discourse per se I want to say it's more of a 19th century if anything and you know but I don't think it really was a connection in any way although I would love to know if anyone has a different take to the second question when Stubbs approached Wedgewood he had dollar signs well pound signs in his eyes because he was like oh this is my great moment I'm going to use this guy first he's going to do my family portrait which he hated he never liked the family portrait it was just like a he founded a disaster but he invites Stubbs over to stay in Aturia obviously to cut down on costs he's like let's share an office because we're doing renovation work it'll be fine we can share it we won't have any issues and then immediately puts him to work he's like well have you thought about ever doing models for Blue Jasper would love it if you tried things out and Stubbs is like oh my god I did not realize what I was getting into and so one of the plaques that I show this is one of the let's see where is it this is Wedgwood's attempt to get to put Stubbs to work right in creating one of these famous scenes and you know he does the faton and so on and so forth but Wedgwood very early on recognizes he's like these are terrible I can't sell these no one's going to buy these they're just commercial failures and so there's an understanding that he can't really commercialize Stubbs in the same way that for example Flaxman is like such a great designer for Wedgwood objects and Stubbs just doesn't translate well into ceramics in terms of paintings like Stubbs's paintings I mean they were not commissioned by Wedgwood right he was never really commissioned well with a caveat he did do portraits of Wedgwood's father-in-law his wife and he did do those on ceramic plaques so there was a little bit of an understanding that like oh this is an interesting new medium I'd like to somehow exploit it in some way but it was never going to be a commercial success and I think at some point they realized this was a terrible idea to work together and you know Stubbs sort of parts ways and I mean he does the family portrait and and I think actually Wedgwood owned I think he owned the laborers at one point if I remember correctly but yeah it was just not a happy happy marriage because I think Stubbs for all the work he did as a commercial artist right painting horses and stuff I really think he thought of himself as an artist right he wanted to experiment and the fact that he comes back to these areas at the very end of his life I mean he does laborers in 1795 I think which is right when Wedgwood dies and the fact that he's coming back to this theme that he had visited earlier on it says something I think about he saw that as a work of art that he wanted to do on another medium so I don't know if I answered your question but yeah Yeah Emma Thanks Sarah very much I wanted to ask about the question of axes because you made this connection between the womb and the shape the oval but they are of course one is the oval of the womb is that you know is vertical and that's a horizontal oval and then of course if it's a platter it's horizontal in another way but then if it's put up on the wall it's vertical that way around and of course it's an oval on a wall it's precisely not a window into the world it's part of a decorative ensemble usually because it's a traditional shape isn't it for a decorative landscape sent into it so that's like it's sort of flatness and resisting the idea that it's a representational view so I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this question of axes and I also wanted to ask about the fact that it is a reproduction of an existing painting it made me think because Gros exhibits his painting of a betrothel at the Salon of 1761 Diderot says this kind of painting that's kind of I think to do with the kind of hard edge clarity of it so sort of similar in a way to Stubbs it's particularly appropriate for reproduction and suggests it should be painted in enamels so I think there's this whole question of reproducibility and enamels and getting back to this question of why ceramics is it to do with reproducibility or durability what exactly is he getting at if that makes sense sure so the oval question I mean I think I do think compositionally it does something to a picture and I think Stubbs was cognizant of that because the earlier version of laborers, reapers are on square formats right it's a typical canvas where you have the whole thing speaking of borders it's the illusion that there is no border it's a kind of endless sweep of landscape and again coming back to that Stubbs and space question there's an immediate contraction and compression of space that happens when he translates that image onto an oval format and I think not to bring in a kind of modernist thing but it's medium specific and I just wanted to show that I didn't reproduce it on my slides but this is the back of the earliest experimental Stubbs painting that we know of and it's actually the back x-ray of a wedgewood platter that he used to paint on and what's unusual about this is that the YCBA as well and on the surfaces it's sleeping cheetah leopard leopard sounds better than cheetah anyways and it's such a wonderful painting because it's this curled up spotted leopard sort of dead center in the plate but you don't know it's a plate unless you turn it around and apparently they did x-rays of it and it even has the wedgewood impressed mark which means that he was experimenting on a ready made plate testing out this oval composition to see what his painting would look like and there's something I mean I'm probably projecting a little bit but there is something about this curled up sleeping leopard that is evocative in some ways of the work he was doing for Burton and trying to figure out how to fit this figure onto an oval format I mean you're right like I think obviously it's not a literal right the ovals on Burton are more vertical and but this understanding that some kind of contraction of space is happening and a compression I think he was very much attuned to and kind of interested in anyway process of firing you know a material shrinkage in the kiln you know just things like it just makes me really think about again that what's happening through that experiment with materiality absolutely and I think he knew a little bit about that process of like painting then firing because he did the enamel on copper and so I assume that the process is somewhat similar but it's also different because you know the sort of rate at which the water is being removed from the colors and being fired and that whole process is so different when it's an expanded format like a huge plate I mean this is like a sizable platter there was a question here and then there's a question in front thank you for your talks very moving especially the bits around where you were moved and we were moved and nothing that stops was around during the time of enslavement and I know that he did horse and dog trim was done on a plantation, slave plantation in Jamaica and I was just curious because as you were talking I was remembering lessons that I had learned from black history about the forceps the tools for during pregnancy was developed from enslaved black women and experimentation and looking at some of your images and across sections and I just wondered if in your research you had come across anything that associated stops with that period of enslavement and the suffering of women, particular women of African heritage were enslaved in your studies yeah that's a really great question I mean I think and again I'm not a specialist of stubs this is sort of my first foray into his work but from what I understand where you see empire appear right is in the form of these kind of exotic animals right that are being sort of studied and kind of categorized by him as a type of painting right animal painting you know he does he does a spotted leopard there's the yes zebra so but in terms of the medical connection I mean absolutely I think that would have been a part of the medical culture of the period right this idea that you could use knowledge developed in the colonial context and feed that into enlightenment concepts right of medicine as a sort of rational reasoned form of knowledge but I don't know specifically where doctors I mean I don't think burden went to Jamaica specifically but there's of course some oh my god what's his name in the late 17th century oh my god British Museum yes Sloan thank you I mean Han Sloan was a doctor right who goes to Jamaica in the 1680s and he is absolutely there on the ground right sort of witnessing the sort of exploitation right of these bodies and I'm sure that had a role in the kind of medical knowledge that he claimed to develop after coming back from Jamaica and sort of rebranding himself right as this expert in medical knowledge but I mean I'll have to think more about the stubs and the stubs and midwifery connection but I mean for sure you can trace right a connection to empire and colonisation I mean it's there already if you just wait for the microphone so people can hear you online thank you do we know how many plaques were actually made and who paid for them did stubs pay for them or did Wedgewood because the experiment will give him to them how was the financing of this that is such a great question and I you know Robin Emerson is the great discoverer of the tea trace book and the sort of records that had and I sort of reproduced so this was in Judy Edgerton based on Robin Emerson's work and I mean as far as I understand the trade off was that stubs would paint portraits for Wedgewood in exchange for him making these platters I mean that was basically he put them to work to pay off I mean it's like there is no wasting money for Wedgewood exactly so the trade off was you'll do a portrait of my father-in-law you'll do a portrait of my wife of myself of my children right and then you can eventually pay off your stubs wasn't a very wealthy artist absolutely whether the buyers put in the price of the plaque or not but it was sort of a sort of given thing rather than a financial today right and I don't think I don't believe these were financially I mean sorry commercially successful in any ways because they were so kind of niche but I do have so from Emerson's records 94 of these platters were put into the kiln and only 39 survived so you know we're talking about almost half not making it and it's such an amazing record because there are comments in the oven book where he's like oh two broken fire one earlier two broken fire three it says crashed but cracked basically two broke I mean there's so many one dunted assume that means dented so you know it was a terrible loss for Wedgewood in a lot of ways which for him because he's an entrepreneur and he's so good at making money it was just like ah but somehow they you know some of them managed to survive so where did Mellon get his from do you know where it came from was it that is a really great question I mean I don't think there was really a market for these specific right so the lady lever gallery has great examples they have a number so Liverpool has really you know a couple of really great ones but yeah I mean Mellon has well two of the sort of perfected ones and they have that great leopard plate but I don't know the same dealer yeah it's something to be interesting to art market I know because people had agents buying them from dealers so it's not but sometimes there's a more specific trail isn't there Martin Possels sorry yeah so when he was obviously in the 60s and 70s approaching a market that was under English people they were terribly interested in this this was marginal stuff on the market especially works that were experimental and is it a work of art is it a plate is it what he would do as you say what he would do and there is a tradition as Malcolm was saying of works you know in animals whether it's limosia or anything else but I think Paul Mellon was in a fortunate position in many ways because he had lots of money but also I'll be honest in the art market in the 60s there wasn't a lot of questions asked about where things were coming from there was no such thing as spoliation we didn't have to prove where it had been we just picked it up I guess the person we need is John Backett he's still very much alive with us he could talk more about this sort of thing but anyway I'd just like to add it's fascinating because I do have a question really and it's to do with I haven't read your book yet but the title is Mellon Kelly Wedgewooden I don't know much about Wedgewooden what I do know is in his relations with Joseph Wright rather than George Stubbs he's quite a character and drives a hardbark but even in the things he was involved in the right there isn't a sort of Mellon Kelly aspect to those works I mean Wright himself is a Mellon Kelly character as we know I never think of Stubbs as that a mortality that's something we've explored a few years ago where those two came very much to the fore the life, death, mortality and because they're not the evolution of whistle-jacket of the force of the skeleton of the eclipse in the second room and it was very visceral because Stubbs' art is very visceral and his animals are still creatures the fact that he was so sensitive to them when they were alive and so sensitive to them when they were dead that goes back to your point when you really get here in disturbing pictures of the moon there hasn't been up to his problems in one since he was a boy he continued to be like a way through his life and it's such a different world to most of his autistic peers no I absolutely agree unfortunately I wasn't able to see that show but the skeleton being incorporated is so fascinating and I do wonder not to read too much into his personal life but I do wonder starting out at a young age working in a courier's workshop where you're dealing with pieces of flesh and having that tanned you know taking those strips and turning them into these objects I mean it's such a different world compared to I imagine other artists and I think you're right I think maybe that lent him a sense of mortality and also just this idea of flesh being this something to be studied and kind of dissected but also intimately tied with death and yeah there's something really morbid about his work in a really interesting way I mean on the subject of Joseph right of Darby and Wedgewood I mean part of the sort of project was to say right progress enlightenment everything with an exclamation mark right I think maybe now is the time to kind of question that because there was always a side of capitalism and entrepreneurial that spirit that was deeply melancholi and you look at his experiment books and his letters to Bentley and he's just like constantly mourning the loss of all these ceramic bodies I mean no other industry has more loss entailed than ceramics like you're only getting a couple of good pieces out of the kiln because it's such a volatile process you never know what is actually going to work and what's going to survive so the whole language of ceramics is self-survivals right you know it's such a melancholi kind of thing and I wanted that to be a part of the story of I mean this version of Wedgewood in a way so but thank you for your questions I've got another That's not a question just that in addition there's this great quote and I don't even know when it was but Wedgewood at some point he says along the lines the dead no the living have to pay for the dead so the ones that actually survive they have to be sold at a price that actually make all these experiments worth it and another thing on the I'm not an expert at all but I always think of Wedgewood hoping that he can actually make these ceramic canvases successfully so that he can not only support other artists but also be the name of the back of these paintings not only on the back of the plate so that maybe also chimes in with the melancholi him hoping that he can make this work in large flat pieces many of you know are really difficult to fire and you're at that in your book as well that's probably also one of the reasons why he chooses the oval format because a square one would be even even more difficult and interestingly Dunted is an actual technical term oh good to know because it's still being used in the 20th century and it's something like when it's sort of when you have a large surface and it sort of sacks so it buckles a little it sort of sinks like a sink hole almost that's what Dunting is if you ever wanted to do that it's a lot of Dunting you can always rely on a PMC research seminar I know we need like a I feel like we need like a stokey dictionary, urban dictionary that would be so great oh my god I think the PMC should sponsor that like a stokey dictionary yes you can write it Rebecca thank you that was really great and there was another question I think we'll take this to our final question and then we can have more informal conversation over drinks I just had one very quick comment actually about the question about the relationship to enslavement and I wondered if the idea of bloodlines and breeding in horses I have a feeling that that's transferring over into some of the ways that people are talking about enslaved populations and I wonder if there's a kind of connection there and the seeing of people as animals and as livestock that can be kind of bred to produce a certain sort of performance no that's a really great connection that feels very kind of vivid in the connection as well between the womb engravings and the horse paintings no that's a really great point but I had a question about the precision of the painting in these ceramic surfaces and do you feel like it's there might have been any evidence of stubs interacting with the painters in Wedgewood's studios or getting any kind of information on how to paint on ceramic surfaces from artisans for whom that was their bread and butter and I also wondered if that's sort of the precision of the facture which in a way is perhaps intention with the experimental nature of the whole undertaking is part of the reason that it kind of seems decorative and sort of perhaps not as kind of exciting and new and doesn't take on this status of being able to raise up the ceramic bodies into the realm of kind of fine original art no that's a really great question and I don't know Rebecca if you know better but I mean the thing with Wedgewood ceramics is that it wasn't decorated and painted and you know there are early examples of transfer printed pieces where it is more representational but the real aesthetic right of Wedgewood is that it wasn't painted because the body itself was stained and it was sculptural right so you had the sort of molded decoration and I think that's why Wedgewood got him to try and try his hand at the sort of freeze like decorations and relief like decorations but I mean in terms of I imagine if he was at Etruria he would have had access to some degree to the workmen there but I would say there was another workshop in London where the decorators were exactly so but what they painted exactly I mean you know just talking to them just because for the online audience general answer to this quite specific question so yes there was painters in London in little China or as you called it so because the academies were here and the proper art schools were here whereas you could learn great ceramics in Stoke but painters were here so but there will have been people at Etruria you were able to do that and yes Wedgewood's aesthetic the blue and white that is sort of his brand that is what sets him apart and that is I presume why he wanted to do that so that he could maybe collect yet another artist to do it in his style that would be my my theory but I'm not an expert on that I don't think it quite worked out the way he wanted to be Well always the hallmark where it opens up more questions and it feels like we're kind of setting off together on the next stuff of this journey and I wanted to borrow Bridget's phrase of the vivid and vividness because I feel like you brought stubs into this kind of a new vivid realm for all of us and again just the kind of liveliness of our discussion and our questions I hope Iris is you feel that of the interest that your work has inspired and just really new thinking on stubs as well I feel that's really exciting it feels like there's so much more work to do on stubs and Wedgewood and beyond so thank you so much for giving us an insight into your work