The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (465 page)

(1755–1828).
American portrait painter. With
Copley
he was the outstanding American portraitist of his period and he is regarded as the creator of a distinctively American style of portraiture. Much of his early career was spent in Scotland (
c.
1771–2), England (1775–87), and Ireland (1787–92). After he settled permanently in America in 1792, he worked briefly in New York City, then moved to Philadelphia, and finally settled in Boston in 1805. He quickly established himself as the outstanding portraitist in the country and painted many of the notables of the new republic. His portraits of George Washington are his most famous works—he created three types, all of which were endlessly copied: the ‘Vaughan’ type (NG, Washington, 1795), the ‘Lansdowne’ type (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1796), and the ‘Athenaeum’ type (Mus. of Fine Arts, Boston, 1796), which is one of the most famous images in American art, being used on the country's one-dollar bill. Stuart's style is notable for its strength of characterization (Benjamin
West
said he ‘
nails
the face to the canvas’) and its fluent brushwork. His work had great influence on the next generation of American painters.

 
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(1724–1806).
English animal painter and engraver, celebrated as the greatest of all horse painters. He was born in Liverpool, the son of a currier and leather-seller, and his life up to his mid-30s (which is poorly documented) was spent mainly in the north of England. Virtually self-taught as a painter and engraver, he seems to have earned his living mainly as a portraitist early in his career, and he also made the illustrations (based on his own dissections) for Dr John Burton's treatise on midwifery (1751). In 1754 he visited Rome, then spent 18 months dissecting and drawing horses in preparation for a book on equine anatomy. He moved to London in about 1758 and, unable to find an engraver to do the work, he made the plates himself, and in 1766 published his famous book—
The Anatomy of the Horse
. It was a great success, prized for its beauty as well as its scientific accuracy and Stubbs was soon in demand as a painter, not only for his ‘portraits’ of horses with their owners or grooms, but also for his conversation pieces in which the sitters were grouped in and around a carriage. His command of anatomy was matched by his ability to depict the beauty and grace of his equine subjects without sentimentalizing them and his range of feeling was wide, extending from the lyrical calm of
Mares and Foals in a River Landscape
(Tate , London,
c.
1763–8) to the full-blooded
Romanticism
of his series of pictures on the theme of a horse attacked by a lion (the largest—
c.
1762—is in the Yale Center for British Art). Stubbs is said to have derived his fascination for the subject from having witnessed a lion attacking a horse in Morocco on his way back from Italy, but he may also have been familiar with a much copied
antique
statue on the theme. Stubbs painted many other animals apart from horses—among them a moose, a rhinoceros, and a zebra. At his death he was working on
A Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body with that of a Tiger and a Common Fowl
, the drawings for which are in the Yale Center for British Art. His scientific curiosity extended to the materials he used and he experimented with painting in
enamel
on earthenware panels manufactured for him by the great potter Josiah Wedgwood. Stubbs's work became less popular during the 1780s and by the end of his life he was in financial difficulties. He kept his great powers until the end, however, and one of his finest works, painted when he was 75, is the enormous
Hambletonian, Rubbing Down
(National Trust, Mount Stewart, 1799), showing the champion horse looking strained and exhausted after winning a race in which it was ‘much cut with the whip’ and ‘shockingly goaded’ with the spur. It is a magnificent, heroic, almost tragic image. Stubbs was for long classified as a superior sporting painter, but his reputation now stands very high; indeed he is placed alongside
Gainsborough
and
Reynolds
in the front rank of English painters of his age.

 
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stucco
.

A type of light, malleable plaster made from dehydrated lime (calcium carbonate) mixed with powdered
marble
and glue and sometimes reinforced with hair. It is used for sculpture and architectural decoration, both external and internal. In a looser sense, the term is applied to a plaster coating applied to the exterior of buildings, but stucco is a different substance from plaster (which is calcium sulphate). Stucco in the more restricted sense has been known to virtually every civilization. In Europe it was exploited most fully from the 16th cent. to the 18th cent., notable exponents being the artists of the School of
Fontainebleau
and Giacomo
Serpotta
. By adding large quantities of glue and colour to the stucco mixture
stuccatori
were able to produce a material that could take a high polish and assume the appearance of marble. Indeed, sometimes it is difficult to distinguish from real marble without touching it (stucco feels warmer).

 
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Stuck , Franz von
.

See
SEZESSION
.

 
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Sturm, Der
(The Assault)
.

Name of a magazine and an art gallery in Berlin, both of which were founded and owned by Herwarth Walden (1878–1941?), a writer and composer whose aim was to promote avant-garde art in Germany. The magazine ran from 1910 to 1932 and the gallery from 1912 to 1932. They became the focus of modern art in Berlin, introducing the work of the
Futurists
to Germany, for example, and publicizing the
Expressionism
of the
Blaue Reiter
group. Walden left Germany in 1932 because of the economic depression and the rise of Nazism and moved to the Soviet Union, where he is said to have died as a political prisoner in 1941.