The Frame Blog

 This article began as a much shorter essay in Judy Egerton’s catalogue raisonné, George Stubbs, painter, Yale, 2007, and is published here to coincide with a small exhibition on Stubbs in the National Gallery (until 31 May 2026). It is dedicated to Sophie, horse whisperer.

Stubbs was lucky in the patronage of some of the wealthiest men in 18^th century England, who could afford not only to commission large and expensive paintings, but to frame them in a style appropriate to their subject and setting. He had moved to London in 1758, and – probably through the agency of Joshua Reynolds – was introduced to a group of aristocrats whose connection was a passion for horseracing, hunting, and breeding horses, and who all owned houses built on a grand scale, the interiors of which could support extremely large canvases in a landscape format. What could be a more perfect pool of patrons and collectors for an artist who had spent a year and a half, from 1756, taking apart numbers of dead horses, investigating, measuring and drawing the parts and their connections, and publishing in 1766, after he had etched all his finished drawings himself, The anatomy of the horse?

Frames as part of the interior decoration

 

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Racehorses exercising at Goodwood, 1759, o/c, 127.3 x 204 cm., for Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, Goodwood House. Please excuse poor quality of photo

An early example of framing to accord with the interior where the paintings would hang is the suite of three large works which Stubbs painted for the 3rd Duke of Richmond, c.1759-60 (Racehorses exercising, The 3rd Duke with the Charlton Hunt, and Shooting at Goodwood). They were probably framed in this early NeoClassical style as part of the rebuilding of Goodwood House from 1760 by Sir William Chambers (Stubbs had met Chambers during his brief foray to Rome in 1754; see below).

Sir William Chambers (1723-96), design for a chimneypiece, 1762, pen-&-ink, wash, 18.4 x 22.3 cm., executed by Simon Vierpyl in the 1760s for Charlemont House, Dublin, Metropolitan Museum, New York https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/362920

Sir William Chambers (1723-96), detail of the Casino at Marino, Dublin, 1758-75, executed by Simon Vierpyl

The flat architrave profile, fluted top edge and plain wide frieze, decorated with festoons swagged from trompe l’oeil ‘nails’ which run along the upper rail and depend from the corners down the lateral rails, are all elements which crop up in Chambers’s output, from the chimneypiece he designed in 1762 for Charlemont House to the top centre façade of the Casino at Marino. The decorative motifs even appear thirty years later in the page of ‘Various Ornamental Utensils’, plate 2 of his Treatise on the decorative part of civil architecture…, where the tripod and urns illustrated there are decorated, not only with fluting and swags, but with one of the ornamental round paterae Chambers used as ‘nailheads’ for the festoons  . The three works by Stubbs in these restrained classical frames, with their central emblematic dogs’ heads, would have fitted just as well into the enlarged Goodwood created by James Wyatt in 1771 and 1787-1806, also in NeoClassical style.

Stubbs probably approved of this style himself, although he and his clients also favoured Baroque Roman frames (the ‘Salvator Rosa’ or subtly differing ‘Carlo Maratta’), which had a similarly linear structure and classical decoration, together with a more robust and sculptural profile. These were variations on an Italian species of frame which had been introduced into England along with paintings acquired on the Grand Tour, and probably sketched in profile by the British artists accompanying or sponsored by the Grand Tourists, or visiting Rome to improve their own knowledge. The original Italian models, and almost certainly the British sketches, were copied by British carvers who provided their own further slight variations of ornament; and the style became so pervasive that it was often referred to simply as a ‘Maratt’, or ‘Marat’. They appear in Reynolds’s pocket books from 1758 to 1766 as ‘Carlo Marat’ [1].

The ‘Salvator Rosa’ and progenitor of the ‘Maratt’: corner detail and profile

A hang of paintings in Salvator Rosa frames in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome

This style has a classicizing architectural structure, based on a deep scotia or hollow between convex or ogee mouldings, and can be used either completely undecorated – the Roman gallery frame, as above in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj – or with up to five orders of carved ornament. It is also versatile enough for practically every genre of painting. This versatility, and the fact that it could fit happily into almost every contemporary British interior (nearly all of which were either Palladian – or classical, Baroque – or classical, and later on Adamesque – or NeoClassical), meant that it appears on work by most British artists from around 1750 to the early 1800s and, as a revival pattern, well beyond [2]. The Rococo style had provided the British with curvaceous and comfy sofas and armchairs, but it impinged very little on internal domestic architecture, so that Rococo frames generally existed within classically-inclined rooms where the Maratta was very much at home, alongside the Palladian or Kent frame.

Stubbs had followed the custom for most British artists by making his own brief visit to Rome in 1754, as noted above, and when in the 1790s he talked to the artist Ozias Humphry about his life, he noted that he had

‘…accompanied the Students in Rome to view the Palaces of the Vatican, Borghese Colonna &c & consider the pictures in Rome’ [3].

The Palazzo Colonna, like the Doria Pamphilj, had walls of paintings arranged in centred tiers, many of them displayed in plain Salvator Rosa frames. It is unlikely that someone as observant and acute as Stubbs remained unaware of these frames, whatever he may have thought of the paintings within them [4]; and as one of the ‘Students’ he encountered was William Chambers, who would six years later be engaged to transform Goodwood for the Duke of Richmond at the same time that Stubbs was working on three very large paintings for him, it is possible that at some point they discussed such a very fashionable Baroque Italian frame in the context of architectural interiors.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), The Grosvenor Hunt, 1762, o/c, 150 x 241.3 cm., Duke of Westminster’s Collection. Please excuse poor quality of photo

The version of the anglicized Roman frame which was used to frame the massive (1¹/₂ metres or 95 inch wide) Grosvenor Hunt for Richard, 1st Earl Grosvenor, is more specifically called a ‘semi-Carlo’, with three orders of ornament; it is the plainest type of ‘Maratta’ most often produced in Britain, with an egg-&-dart at the back edge, a characteristically undecorated top moulding, and a plain scotia between a ribbon-&-stave moulding and a cross-cut acanthus-&-shield on the ogee at the sight edge [5]. It is an economical choice for such a large painting as it could be produced fairly quickly, having no complicated corner ornaments; it could also be easily scaled-up to the width necessary to hold a canvas five feet by eight. Apart from these practical considerations, the linear form has a strong but restrained cast which might be seen as appropriate for sporting and landscape subjects; and although the carved ornament is comparatively muted, it betrays through its skilful workmanship that it was destined for an important interior – such as the incarnation of Eaton Hall inhabited at that time by Lord Grosvenor.

Frames like those made for the Duke of Richmond and Lord Grosvenor may be the choice of the client, of the architect working for the client, or of the artist guiding the client. Many patrons preferred to turn the business of framing their pictures over to the painters who created them; the latter would sub-contract the task out to a chosen framemaker, who would also usually be responsible for packing and delivering the framed and finished work to its destination. In the case of patrons with grand houses – often, through the 18^th century, in an almost constant state of updating, rebuilding or enlarging – the architect involved might have some or much of the say as to the type and ornamentation of the framing, especially where inset frames were concerned.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Whistlejacket, c.1762, o/c, 296.1 x 248 cm., now National Gallery, montaged with the original frame and decorated wall of the Whistlejacket Room, Wentworth Woodhouse

The stunningly large and dramatic portrait of Whistlejacket was executed almost contemporaneously with The Grosvenor Hunt, and just a few years after the three large paintings for Goodwood.  Like these, it was commissioned by a wealthy client with a handsome house, and it was bound even more closely to the interior for which it was designed. The client was the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, whose father had employed Henry Flitcroft to remake Wentworth House (as it was then called) in Palladian style, and who himself commissioned John Carr of York for additions, and ‘Athenian’ Stuart for some interior details.

The Whistlejacket Room is in full Palladian style, with gilded stucco decorative panels and an inset architectural frame for Stubbs’s painting, with outset corners, an open swan’s neck pediment, lateral scrolling modillions, and flowered drops. Stucco palms in the outset panel above the canvas support a wreath, both of which symbolize the horse’s worth, achievement and value. The frame functions like a Kentian window, through which the occupants of the room can see the representation of a modern Pegasus rearing on his celestial golden field. The work of art as a whole is a sort of mythologizing of an otherwise almost completely naturalistically depicted animal, presented in a classicizing frame which emphasizes through its own grandeur, combined with the ‘gold ground’, the semi-divinity of this Olympian beast.

As Whistlejacket hangs now in the National Gallery, in a contemporary but much plainer Palladian frame, the accumulated significance and symbolism of the original setting in Wentworth Woodhouse is lost, and Stubbs’s magnificent portrait is no more than a very great painting of a life-sized horse on a canvas which looks as though it’s waiting for the background to be painted in [6].

George Stubbs (1724-1806), A lion attacking a stag,   1765-66, o/c, 243.8 x 332.7 cm., and detail; Yale Center for British Art.

The Marquess of Rockingham commissioned two more very large paintings from Stubbs for the Green Room of his London house, 4 Grosvenor Square (now the Italian Embassy).  These are A lion attacking a horse (1762), and A lion attacking a stag (1765-66). Both are now in the Yale Center for British Art, and retain their original frames, which are the siblings of the Whistlejacket frame – but with carved lions’ heads at the centre of the upper panel, and scrolling acanthus branches replacing the palm leaves. They were almost certainly built into the wall of the room like the latter, with similar stucco ornaments around them. 4 Grosvenor Square had been altered by the Palladian architect and designer Henry Flitcroft in the early 1740s, and in 1764 he supervised ‘the stuccoing of the house, at an unknown expense, by the plasterer Joseph Rose, whose “great care in Chusing and mixing the materialls” he praised in hoping the work would be “an Example worthy of Imitation” ‘ [7]. Probably Rose also executed the stuccos in the Whistlejacket Room at Wentworth Woodhouse; the framemaker has not yet been identified.

More British ‘Maratta’ frames

The Maratta frame for The Grosvenor Hunt may have been relatively plain, but many more ornate versions can be found on other works by Stubbs; this was a frame which became the archetypal way to display not only his work, but landscapes and portraits generally – of people, horses and pets.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Mares and foals, 1761-62, o/c, 99 x 187 cm., and detail, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

Mares and foals, which was painted in 1761-62 and may be the earliest of Stubbs’s groups or friezes of horses in landscapes, has a Maratta with four orders of ornament – an ovolo chain at the back edge, an enriched ribbon-&-stave beneath the (plain) top edge, a separately-carved and applied ogee element with acanthus-&-shield in the scotia, and another ovolo chain at the sight edge. This may, however, be a later reframing, since few if any of the original frames in this style on Stubbs’s paintings seem to have the applied acanthus moulding in the scotia, or to have so wide a rail.

The picture was painted for Frederick, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, of Lydiard House, one of Stubbs’s first patrons; he owned a string of twenty racehorses (seventy, throughout his life), and commissioned a number of group and single portraits of them. Many of these paintings were submitted for auction by Christie’s in 1780, but were bought in by Bolingbroke’s son and continued in the family house until a further sale by Christie’s in 1943. Some of them retained their original frames, but if Mares and foals in its atypical Maratta has indeed been reframed, it is most likely to have taken place after this point – an aggrandisement to emphasize the importance of the work.

Molly Longlegs, another of Viscount Bolingbroke’s horses, had her portrait painted with her jockey in 1762, the same year in which Lord Grosvenor’s picture was executed, and was given a Maratta, which is still on the painting, with four orders of ornament.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Molly Longlegs, 1762, o/c, 101 x 126.8 cm., and detail, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

These include egg-&-dart at the back edge, and a top edge beautifully carved with the ornament known as ‘stopped channel fluting’, which fans out from the centre of rail, enhancing the apparent spatial recession of the pictured space and increasing focal emphasis on the image.  The ornament, in effect, ‘points’ inward to the picture, and optical tricks like this would be more within the knowledge of the artist than that of the patron. Its use may therefore indicate that this is the choice of Stubbs – or, rather, of Stubbs together with his framemaker [8].

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, c.1765, 102 x 193.6 cm., and details, Christie’s,  5 July 2011, Lot 12

Another of Lord Bolingbroke’s winning horses was Gimcrack, who was painted in a much larger and busier scene than Molly Longlegs. Gimcrack was small but nippy, winning twenty-six out of the thirty-six races he ran in his career, and becoming popular with the racing public. He had just been acquired from William Wildman, a wealthy butcher, when he was painted by Stubbs – who had already produced a portrait of him for Wildman, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, and set in a contemporary British Régence-style frame which is almost certainly the choice of the commissioner or a later owner .

The frame for Bolingbroke’s Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath is an elaborate and individual variation on the Maratta, with five orders of ornament and a decorated scotia. It includes acanthus leaf back and sight edges, a centred gadrooned top edge, an astragal-&-triple bead beneath the top edge, and a centred imbricated bay leaf moulding between the scotia and sight edge. The scotia or hollow holds carved centre and corner ornaments of scrolling foliage and acanthus branches, and – in the reposes between these – the ground of the hollow is recut in the gesso with shaped panels of diapering. The gadrooning at the top edge is similar to the stopped channel fluting on the top edge of Molly Longlegs’s frame: each teardrop-shaped gadroon (or ‘godron’) points inward to the painting, and is set at a raking angle, giving a perspectival thrust to the inward movement and emphasizing the opening-up of the landscape to the far distance, just visible beyond the further gate. Light falling on the convex surfaces of the gadrooning conveys movement and animation to the painted scene, and the recut panels (the ‘reparure‘) echo the texture of the foreground weeds and grasses, and the shapes of tiled roof and brickwork. It’s an extremely handsome frame for a famous horse.

Photographs of Lydiard House when empty, taken for Country Life in 1955, show the style of the interior, but not where such a spectacularly painted and framed work might have hung.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Two gentlemen a-shooting, 1768, o/c, 101.4 x 127.2 cm., and detail, Yale Center for British Art, B1976.7.86

Another version of the Maratta appears on each of the set of four paintings which show the stages of a day spent shooting game, executed between 1767 and 1770 [9]. These are smaller works which have been given depth and emphasis by their frames – by the leaf at the back edge, the ovolo chain moulding on the top edge with its acanthus leaf corners, and by the gadrooned ornament at the sight edge, which again points inward to the painted image. Although the decoration is comparatively rich, it is restrained and rhythmic, and the overall effect harmonizes with the tranquillity of the different landscapes and opens them to the viewer, who is led along their paths towards the distant trees and hills.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Two gentlemen shooting, c.1769, o/c, 99.1 x 124.5 cm., Yale Center for British Art, B1976.7.87

The frames were made-to-measure for the four slightly differently-sized works, but have subsequently been fitted with slips at the sight edges after the paintings were restored and lined. All four seem to have belonged to Thomas Bradford, a printseller, in partnership with William Wildman, and may have been acquired when Stubbs exhibited them at the Society of Artists from 1767 to 1770 [10]. The suite of four frames might therefore have been made for the exhibition, or were perhaps commissioned by Wildman, who owned the set of paintings until 1787 [11]. They are unaltered, save for having been heavily regilded with oil gilding over the original oil- and water-gilding.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), A cheetah and stag with two Indian attendants, c.1765, o/c, 182.7 x 275.3 cm. (72 x 108 ins), Manchester CAG

The most richly ornamented of Stubbs’s Maratta frames is found on A cheetah and stag with two Indian attendants, 1765. This huge work – it is nine feet wide – was painted for Sir George (later Lord) Pigot, Governor-General of Madras, and was given a frame of exceptional quality and opulence, almost certainly commissioned through the artist since it is stylistically related to so many others of Stubbs’s frames.

A frame like this functioned as an advertisement of the status and wealth of the owner; here, it also mirrored the exoticism of the subject. The cheetah had been ferried from India and presented to George III by Pigot; it was trained to hunt, and the king’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, set up a display in the park at Windsor with a stag as its intended prey. The stag had other ideas, and managed to throw the cheetah three times with the help of its antlers, winning a silver collar and a lifetime’s protection from the duke. Stubbs’s composition was Romantically wild rather than realistic, with bits of Cheshire and Derbyshire standing in for Windsor, and the extremely rich and detailed workmanship of the frame similarly enhanced the distinction of the cheetah and her trainers.

George Stubbs, A cheetah and stag with two Indian attendants, detail

The frame is a ‘full Carlo’, comprising a back edge with a beautifully detailed cross-cut acanthus and shield moulding, a top edge of gadrooning alternating with narrow acanthus leaves, an enriched ribbon-&-stave, and an intricate ornament carved on the ogee at the sight edge of very finely carved cross-cut acanthus alternating with a reversed shell motif.

The width of frame rail required to support the great size of the painting means that the amount of carving contained within that width is very considerable, and, given the elaboration of the ornament and the fact that it seems to be to have been designed specifically for the patron, this must have been one of the more expensive picture frames produced in the 1760s.  The painting cost Pigot £120 – over £18,600 today – which probably didn’t include the frame: more than 9 metres – more than 33 feet – of complex sculpture, where only a very small fillet and hollow were left undecorated.  Even so, this frame has a twin, since the portrait Stubbs painted of Lord Pigot on his horse is framed in an identical pattern (reduced in scale by half to fit the 40 x 50 in. canvas). As well as advertizing the status of the owner, these frames were equally a confirmation of the worth of Stubbs’s work.

Stubbs, Wedgwood, and Thomas Vials, carver and gilder

 

Stubbs almost certainly used – or suggested to Pigot that he use – Thomas Vials to frame the two works commissioned from him [12]. He may well have been using Vials from soon after he arrived in London in 1758, probably through a recommendation from Joshua Reynolds.

Henry Chamberlain, A New and Compleat History and Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, etc., 1770, detail; houses of Stubbs (top left), Reynolds (centre, Leicester Square), Thomas Vials (centre, [Great ]Newport Street and Leicester Square), Royal Academy (right). Map from A London Inheritance

Reynolds’s studio was on the west side of Leicester Square; Vials worked first in Great Newport Street, which ran above the north-east corner of Leicester Square, and later on the east side of the Square itself [13]. Both painter and framemaker were conveniently sited for conveying paintings to and from the Royal Academy, which at this point was in Somerset House on the Thames, off the Strand. Stubbs’s house was a little removed to the north; it was appropriately in Somerset Street, above Oxford Street.

Reynolds (1723-99), John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset, 1769, o/c, 244.5 x 153 cm., Knole, NT

Vials achieved an admirable reputation for the quality of his workmanship, which was in demand for some of the grander houses in the country. In 1770 he carved the frame for Reynolds’s portrait of the 3rd Duke of Dorset, in the Sackville house of Knole; this is remarkably close in style and decoration to the frames for Pigot’s Cheetah and portrait on horseback, and suggests that unique designs for one particular client didn’t remain unique for long.

In the late 1760s Stubbs began to experiment with painted enamel plaques, in an effort to achieve a permanent image which would avoid the fugitive qualities of some oil colours, and at first he used copper as a support. The weight of the copper, however, restricted its size, and it was through the search for some other support which would enable him to produce larger images that he was introduced to the firm of Wedgwood  and Bentley.

Josiah Wedgwood was completely different from Stubbs’s aristocratic horseracing, hunting patrons; all he shared with them was an interest in scientific discovery.  He was an entrepreneur, potter and industrialist, who initially owned a pottery in Burslem and then, from 1769, a ceramics factory called the Etruria Works in Stoke-on-Trent. He taught himself chemistry in order to improve the quality of his products and their glazes, and in 1768 went into partnership with Thomas Bentley, a businessman who looked after the London end of the Etruria Works. Wedgwood first met Stubbs in 1775, beginning a project with him which would attempt to produce earthenware plaques on a large enough scale to stand in for artists’  canvases, and which finally began to bear fruit in 1777-78.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Mrs French’s lap-dog, 1782, enamel on Wedgwood plaque, 45.7 x 62.2 cm., Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

In 1782 Stubbs exhibited at the RA five paintings in enamel on Wedgwood’s ceramic plaques, including Mrs French’s lap-dog, Isabella Saltonstall as Una, from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’, and his own self-portrait, all of which are oval and the largest of which is the Self-portrait, at 69.7 cm. or c. 27 ¹/₂ inches high.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Self -portrait, 1781, enamel on Wedgwood plaque, 69.7 x 53.1 cm. oval, National Portrait Gallery

It is framed in a beautifully conceived and executed example of a NeoClassical pattern (related to Italian prototypes and also an evolution from the profile of a Maratta), with a hollow fluted outer frame and an inner mount with oval sight and spandrels decorated with daisy-like rosettes.  The main structure is made characteristically of British pine; however, it is ornamented on the top edge with a centred, imbricated (or overlapping) bay leaf-&-berry moulding, and at the back and sight edges with a fine leaf-tip moulding. These are very finely carved, the detail requiring a harder wood (which may be boxwood) than the pine carcase [14].

This frame was apparently partly chosen by Wedgwood himself, according to his correspondence with his business partner, Thomas Bentley. Stubbs was painting, in 1780, a large family piece for Wedgwood (see below) carried out in oil on wood; in October of that year Wedgwood asks Bentley to  visit the framemaker Thomas Vials of Leicester Square  (‘or … some other frame  makers’), as

‘Mr Stubs [sic] is … very desirous of seeing my picture framed’.

Wedgwood does not want to order a frame unseen, and so he asks Bentley to

‘chuse a pattern for me. It must be 5ft.  11 ¹/₂ ins by 3′ 11 ¹/₂ within & not less than 6 or 7 inches broad…’.

He adds that he will ‘leave the choice entirely to your good taste’, but he includes a drawing of a frame section for Bentley’s guidance, which is followed in a subsequent letter by another drawing

‘a little alter’d from the section in my last… Mr Stubs  approves so much of this model (though he had not the least hand in designing it) that he will adopt it for his first enamel picture of the largest size…’ [15].

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Isabella Saltonstall as Una, in Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’, enamel on Wedgwood plaque, 47.9 x 63.8 cm., oval, Fitzwilliam Museum

He also refers to the ‘flutes’ and ‘beads’ in this model, and Stubbs certainly used a fluted scotia on the frames of his Self-portrait and Isabella Saltonstall as Una in Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen’. There are no beads, but the fluted hollow and the arrangement of the flutes, which have a common centre with the garland of leaves around them, and which Wedgwood emphasized in the clay model of a frame profile which he also sent to London, clearly remain.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Sir Sidney Medows, 1778, o/panel, 82.6 x 101.65 cm., Royal Collection Trust RCIN 400550

Stubbs had, however, used a practically identical version of the outer frames on these two enamels for the 1778 oil painting of Sir Sidney Medows (or Meadows) on horseback, so it seems more than likely that he had managed to guide Wedgwood into approving the pattern he liked, whilst also causing his client to think that it was his own design. It must have been Stubbs, as well, who gave Wedgwood the name of Thomas Vials.

George Stubbs 1724-1806), The farmer’s wife and the raven, 1782, enamel on Wedgwood plaque, 72.5 x 94.5 cm., Lady Lever Art Gallery

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Self-portrait on a white hunter, 1782, enamel on Wedgwood plaque, 93 x 71 cm., Lady Lever Art Gallery

The same fluted scotia frame, but with a more elaborate spandrel decoration of foliate scrolls, appears on The farmer’s wife and the raven, 1782; whilst for Stubbs’s Self-portrait on a white hunter, also of 1782, the structure of the hollow outer frame was retained in a perfectly plain version with no enrichments, along with the spandrel decoration and leaf-tip sight edge, but finished with parcel gilding on an ebonized ground [16]. These last two were getting on for the largest plaques which Wedgwood managed to fire satisfactorily.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Josiah Wedgwood, 1780, enamel on Wedgwood plaque , 52.1 x 40 cm. oval, V & A Wedgwood Collection, World of Wedgwood, Barlaston

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Mrs Sarah Wedgwood, 1780, enamel on Wedgwood plaque, 50 x 40 cm. oval, V & A Wedgwood Collection, World of Wedgwood, Barlaston

Parcel-gilt ebonized frames, this time oval in shape like the pictures they contain, were used again for the pair of portraits Stubbs painted in 1780 of Wedgwood and his wife Sarah. These are likewise enamelled on ceramic plaques, and the choice of ebonized wood may have been made to enhance even more the clarity of colour obtained by the enamelling process. The gilded ornament is a band of guilloche which forms a rich contrast to the polished black wood.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), The Wedgwood family portrait, 1780, o/oak panel, 149 x 213 cm., and details, V & A Wedgwood Collection, World of Wedgwood, Barlaston

Meanwhile, the painting of the Wedgwood family – which had first involved Wedgwood and Bentley in the choosing of a suitable frame – was finally set in a NeoClassical architrave pattern. This retained a run of beading at the sight edge, but had no flutes. It was also ornamented with an egg-&-dart moulding beneath the top edge and  a carved band of guilloche, enriched with small rosettes, applied to the central flat frieze, and given fashionable anthemion or honeysuckle corners.

One account states that it was bought from Thomas Vials for just over £30 (43 feet at 14 shillings a foot) [17]; this cannot be correct, however. Wedgwood describes the painting as measuring 6 feet by 4 feet, which would be just over twenty feet of moulding, allowing for the corners [18]. The canvas actually measures c. 4 feet 11 inches x 7 feet – 285 inches around the whole contour, or 23 feet 9 inches, plus the corners, all of which would have cost (at 14 shillings a foot) about £21 at the outside. Wedgwood was a shrewd businessman, who believed in value for his money; his letters show him reluctant to spend even 12 shillings a foot, never mind 14, but he seems to have been satisfied with the deal which he eventually made with Thomas Vials. The repetition of the guilloche band on the two oval portraits of Sarah and Josiah Wedgwood (above) indicates that Vials may also have produced these two frames.

Although Wedgwood seems keen to underline his own rôle in the confection of the fluted hollow frame, it is clear from his letters to Bentley that he defers both to his artist’s opinions and to those of the framemaker. He states that,

‘Mr Stubs desires the rabbet which holds the panel may be bevel’d towards the edge’,

and sketches what is meant. There is indeed a bevel at the sight of The Wedgwood family frame, but not on the scale of the sketch; the latter has a wide ‘flat part next to the picture’ which Thomas Vials apparently advised Bentley against using. Furthermore, Wedgwood goes quite deeply into the construction and finish of the frame. He objects to

‘dale [deal, or pine]’ as ‘too soft & rough for oil painting… Mr Stubs’s varnish’d frames are very sharp & smooth & I think are not of dale’ [19].

He also forbids the use of whiting (or gesso) as an aid to moulding ornament, and tells Bentley that Stubbs ‘has a great objection’ to matt and burnished water gilding, and ‘prefers the oil gilding’. Stubbs seems to have thought that water gilding ‘cannot be clean’d with safety’, and that oil gilding was longer-lasting (which would probably not be the accepted view today) [20]; however, this may have been a function of cost, and the artist may simply have been trying to save his patron money. He tells Wedgwood that the whole frame, if oil gilded, should work out ‘at a much less price’ than the 12 shillings a foot quoted by Thomas Vials [21].

Stubbs, the Prince, and Thomas Allwood, carver & gilder

 

George Stubbs (1724-1806), William Anderson with two saddle-horses, 1793, o/c, 102.3 x 128.2 cm., Royal Collection Trust. RCIN 400106

By the 1790s Stubbs’s patrons included the Prince of Wales (later George IV). The Prince commissioned portraits of himself, his friends, his regiments, but mainly of his horses, employing not only Stubbs but three other artists for the purpose.  He also spent munificently on frames for all these works, in 1792 purchasing seven frames from the carver and gilder Sefferin Nelson for pictures by George Garrard, and between 1790 and 1793 ordering at least ten more for Stubbs’s paintings – possibly as many as fourteen – from Thomas Allwood (fl.1752-d.1819) [22].  The frame of William Anderson with two saddle-horses is very like the fluted hollow frames which Stubbs had ordered from Thomas Vials for his enamels, and perhaps Allwood was given an example to copy, or had already incorporated it into his stock of designs as it had diffused into general use. The only difference is in the top edge, where the torus moulding of imbricated bay leaves is more detailed and more realistic [23]. Allwood seems to have carved six frames in this pattern for the Prince, and eight in an Adam-like style, with an entablature profile and a frieze decorated with a shallow ornament of bunched bay leaves or bellflowers which is centred, and depends from a daisy-like patera at each corner.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Soldiers of the 10th Light Dragoons, 1793, o/c, 102.2 x 128.1 cm., Royal Collection Trust. RCIN 400512

(left) Fluted hollow frame for Stubbs’s William Anderson with two saddle-horses, detail, almost certainly by Thomas Allwood; (right) entablature frame with bunched leaf frieze for Stubbs’s Soldiers of the 10th Light Dragoons, detail, by Thomas Allwood; both Royal Collection Trust, as above

An invoice from Allwood to the prince (14^th February 1793) still exists for eight frames; it records,

‘To Carving & Gilding eight Picture frames of half length size for sundry Pictures painted by Mr Stubbs, all of one pattern’.

A  second invoice (11^th May 1793) charges the prince for two more frames of the same size; neither specifies how many of which design(s) the invoices refer to.

Allwood charged £110.16s.0d for the eight frames mentioned in the first invoice [24]. This would be only £13.17.0 per frame if all of them were of the same pattern (they all seem to be of the same size: 40 ¹/₄ by just over 50 inches). The fluted hollow frame has three orders of ornament: the bay leaf torus bound with ribbon at the top edge, the fluted scotia with acanthus leaf corners, and a bay leaf-&-dart on an ogee at the sight edge. The Adam-like frame comprises four orders of ornament: the top edge carved on the ogee with an acanthus leaf-&-shell moulding, a bay leaf-&-dart on a smaller ogee, the shallow bunched leaf frieze, and a ribbon-&-stave at the sight edge.

The price is typically moderate in comparison with the sums which the paintings themselves commanded. However, it can also be compared with the price Thomas Vials had quoted thirteen years before for the first version of the frame on The Wedgwood family, which had worked out at 12 shillings per foot. The Allwood frames work out at 18 shillings and sixpence per foot, but are more ornate and executed with much greater finesse than the final version of The Wedgwood family frame; they are also finished in water gilding rather than the cheaper oil gilding which Stubbs had recommended [25]. The ornament on the Adam-like suite of frames, restrained by the linear form of the mouldings and overall structure, creates a shimmering halo around the paintings. Light flickers on the different facets of the decoration as if on a length of military braid; and the effect of the eight works together must have been strikingly rich and colourful.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Dungannon with a lamb, 1793, o/c, 99 x 126 cm., and details, private collection. On loan to National Gallery for the exhibition on Stubbs

A plainer version was available for less princely or slightly more parsimonious clients – the same in all respects, save for having no ornament  on the frieze (except the corner paterae), and being oil- rather than water- gilt.

It is evident that, in spite of the lack of popularity of his enamelled work, the oil paintings of Stubbs from the 1760s to the 1790s were valued by those who commissioned them to a very high degree, which is illustrated by and reflected in the fine quality of the frames which were chosen for them. Stubbs himself was evidently used to dealing with frames of exceptional quality; in a letter to Daniel Daulby of the Liverpool Academy in 1787, he states that he wants Haymakers and Reapers put into plain frames, as he is aware that ‘much mischief’ has been done to original frames [26]. The versions he is referring to are the 1785 canvases  in the Tate Gallery which are now in run-of-the-mill 18^th century Rococo frames of a characteristically British design, pierced and sanded with central rocaille cartouches, and probably added by a later purchaser.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Haymakers, 1794, enamel on Wedgwood biscuit earthenware, 74.5 x 103 cm., oval, Lady Lever Art Gallery

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Haycarting, 1794/95, enamel on Wedgwood biscuit earthenware, 77 x 195 cm., oval, Lady Lever Art Gallery

However, the oval enamelled plaques, Haymakers and Haycarting of 1794/95, are in much more striking and beautifully-carved spandrel frames of a refined NeoClassicism, which are unrelated to the fluted hollow spandrel frames of the early 1780s, but are almost identical in their outer mouldings to the Allwood frames made for the Prince of Wales in 1793. They have the same top edge of acanthus leaf and shell (now shaped rather more like an anthemion), the same small burnished hollow, leaf tip-&-dart, corner rosettes and ribbon-&-stave mouldings, and only lack the garland of bunched leaves or bellflowers on the outer frieze.

George Stubbs (1724-1806), Reapers, 1795, enamel on Wedgwood biscuit earthenware, 76.8 x 102.9 cm., oval, and detail, Yale Center for British Art

The quality of the workmanship is very high, and together with the convergence of the design makes it all but certain that these two frames, and that of the separated third of the trio, Reapers, are also by Thomas Allwood.

The lack of documentation relating to Stubbs (the dearth of letters, studio logs, account books, etc.), and the paucity of records amongst his patrons’ surviving papers (two invoices for frames by Allwood and letters implying that frames were made by Vials), make it impossible to give a definitive account of his attitude to and choice of frames. We have an indirect report by Wedgwood of Stubbs’s preference for a NeoClassical style, and for the materials and finish of his frames; however, the main witness in this study is the quality of the existing original frames themselves. This, and the invoices and letters, associate Stubbs with two of the more accomplished English carvers and gilders in the second half of the eighteenth century, and bear witness to the prestige in which his work was held.

 

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[1] Nicholas Penny, ‘Reynolds and picture frames, The Burlington Magazine, November 1986, p.813

[2] ‘Carlo Maratta’ frames appear on paintings by Reynolds, Gainsborough, William Hoare, Joseph Wright of Derby, Pompeo Batoni, Zoffany, Francis Cotes, Benjamin West and Angelica Kauffman, amongst others

[3] Ozias Humphry & Joseph Mayer, A memoir of George Stubbs, with introduction by Anthony Mould, 2026

[4] Not much, apparently

[5] Similar frames can be seen on Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charlotte Walpole, Countess of Dysart, 1775, Ham House; John Singleton Copley, Sir William Pepperell & his Family, 1788, North Carolina Museum of Art; and (with a different back moulding) Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Christopher Whichcote, Bt, 1775, Burghley House

[6] The Whistlejacket frame at Wentworth Woodhouse now contains a copy of Stubbs’s painting – rather like Raphael’s St Cecilia, which is stuck in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna in a copy of its original frame, whilst the frame itself remains in situ, in the chapel for which it was constructed, and holds a copy of St Cecilia.There is much discussion as to whether the canvases of large horses with unpainted backgrounds were left so that the respective owner could choose the landscape or other setting he wanted; whether they were left because the owner preferred the composition to consist solely of the horse; or whether the artist never had time to finish them

[7] 4 Grosvenor Square in Survey of London, vol. 40, Part 2, pp. 117 ff

[8] Similar frames can be found on John Constable, Parham’s Mill, Billingham, 1824, and Hove Beach, both Fitzwilliam Museum; and on Canaletto, Venice: A View of the Piazzetta Looking North, Sotheby’s Sale, 5 July 2006, Lot 58

[9] The remaining two of the group of four are Two gentlemen going a-shooting, with a view of Creswell Crags, taken on the spot, c.1767, and A repose after shooting, 1770

[10] Judy Egerton, British sporting and animal paintings, 1655-1867, exh. cat., Tate Gallery for the Yale Center for British Art, 1978, pp. 81

[11] Marattas frames with a similar egg moulding on the top edge (although without the gadrooned sight) can be found on William Ashford, An Idyllic Landscape, NG Dublin, and on Johann Zoffany, Richard Neville Neville, Audley End

[12] Thomas Vials (Vial, Viall, or Vialls) was working from 1756 and was dead by March 1780; his business became Vials & Co. of Leicester Fields (Leicester Square), London (DEFM). See the entry in BIFMO

[13] See the entry for Thomas Vials in Jacob Simon, The directory of British picture framemakers, NPG website

[14] Jacob Simon, The art of the picture frame, 1996, National Portrait Gallery, p.163

[15] The correspondence between Wedgwood and Bentley is published in Basil Taylor, ‘ Josiah Wedgwood and George Stubbs’, Proceedings of the Wedgwood Society, no. 4, 1961, pp.209-22 . The  three relevant letters are dated 28th October, 4th November, and 12th November 1780

[16] An almost identical  version of this parcel gilt black frame also appears on John Flaxman’s Portrait of Ozias Humfrey, Lady Lever Museum

[17] Ruth Vincent-Kemp, George Stubbs and the Wedgwood connection, 1986, p.44

[18] Simultaneously with painting the Wedgwoods, Stubbs was painting The Fitzherberts having breakfast, a panel of almost exactly the same size.  Mr Fitzherbert (or Fitzwilliams, as Wedgwood calls him) wanted his painting framed in the same pattern as The Wedgwood family, so that this price may be for both frames: 43 feet at 14 shillings per foot

[19] This is confirmed in the construction of the frame on Stubbs’s Self-portrait as reported above, in that it has carved hardwood ornament (probably boxwood) applied to a pine carcase

[20] This was certainly not the view in France or Italy during the 18^th century, but may be an indication of the attitude in Britain at the time which led to so many water-gilded frames being obscured with a layer of oil gilding

[21] Taylor, op.cit., pp. 220-21

[22]   Thomas Allwood, of 35 Great Russell St, London, is recorded as working between 1772 & 1793 (DEFM); he may well have been in business seven years earlier when the Pigot frame was made.  He was also employed by two of Stubbs’s other patrons: 1) Sir John Nelthorpe; accounts exist of a payment on 8 July 1783 for carving & gilding a picture frame, £4. 13s, and of one on 8 April 1785, ‘to  carving & gilding two frames for pictures by Mr Stubbs’, £1 4s 6d. (DEFM). 2) the 3rd Duke of Richmond, of Goodwood House; a record exists of a payment to ‘Thos. Allwood carver 9s.’ in the ‘Christmas Quarter 1789’, under the heading ‘London Furniture’. I am grateful to Rosemary Baird, Curator of Goodwood House, and Tim McCann, Archivist, West Sussex Record Office, for this last information

[23] This is the difference between a laurel leaf and a bay leaf: a laurel is as large as a biggish hand, thick, and with a smooth contour; a bay leaf is quite a bit smaller, thinner, with a frilly contour. The leaf used on frame mouldings is a bay leaf, as it’s much more decorative; laurel leaves belong in hedges

[24] Oliver Millar, The later Georgian pictures in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen, London, 1969, p.122. Stubbs has endorsed the Allwood bill: ‘This is a true Bill – Geo: Stubbs’

[25] Wedgwood mentions a price of 4 shillings and sixpence per foot for an oil gilt version of The Wedgwood family frame; but this was at a point when he was suggesting the hollow fluted  pattern, with beading, as his favoured choice

[26] Information from  Judy Egerton