If you hap­pen to be in Man­ches­ter with a spare hour or two, do call into its art gallery on Mosley Street where you’ll find a host of inter­est­ing paint­ings, not least of which is Chee­tah and Stag with Two Indi­ans by George Stubbs. Stubbs was an Eng­lish artist, born in Liv­er­pool in 1724 and who moved to York in 1744 to pur­sue his pas­sion for human anato­my, study­ing under the sur­geon Charles Atkin­son at York Coun­ty Hos­pi­tal. He was also a nat­ur­al and entire­ly self-taught artist, and worked as a por­trait painter in York for ten more years, but he would become famous lat­er not for paint­ing human sit­ters but ani­mal ones, par­tic­u­lar­ly hors­es (of which his best-known, Whistle­jack­et, is at the Nation­al Gallery in Lon­don).

By 1764, Stubbs had estab­lished a rep­u­ta­tion for his anatom­i­cal­ly accu­rate ani­mal paint­ings, and attract­ed the atten­tion of the roy­al court, who had com­mis­sioned him, the year before, to paint Queen Charlotte’s South African zebra. He was, then, the obvi­ous choice when a cer­tain out­go­ing Gov­er­nor Gen­er­al of Madras, Sir George Pig­ot, arrived back in Lon­don with a menagerie of “wild beasts and curiosi­ties” as gifts for King George III, and was look­ing for an artist to paint a por­trait of the most exot­ic of those gifts, a mag­nif­i­cent chee­tah.

Eas­i­ly tamed and trained, chee­tahs had been used as hunt­ing ani­mals by the Mogul Emper­ors for hun­dreds of years. In that spir­it, the King’s uncle, the Duke of Cum­ber­land, was eager to put the King’s chee­tah through its paces and so arranged a demon­stra­tion in Wind­sor Great Park, where George Stubbs was present to cap­ture the occa­sion on can­vas.

A stag was duly placed in an enclo­sure of the roy­al pad­dock while the chee­tah was pre­pared by Pigot’s Indi­an ser­vants. First, they ‘hood­winked’ the ani­mal by tying a red blind­fold over its face, whilst one of the ser­vants held it by a restrain­ing sash around the hindquar­ters. A ser­vant then pulled back the hood back to allow the chee­tah a first sight of its quar­ry, whilst the oth­er one ges­tured towards the stag, and the preda­tor was unleashed. What hap­pened next was not quite what was intend­ed: accord­ing to the St James’s Chron­i­cle the stag staunch­ly defend­ed itself and end­ed up chas­ing the chee­tah off!

The paint­ing has been praised for its sin­cere ren­der­ing and lack of Euro­pean con­de­scen­sion: in an age when for­eign vis­i­tors were pic­tured at best as colour­ful exotics, at worst as sin­is­ter or ridicu­lous car­i­ca­tures, Stubbs endowed the ser­vants with a grace and authen­tic­i­ty equal to the mag­nif­i­cent crea­ture they were car­ing for.

Post­script Chee­tahs are no longer to be found wild in the Indi­an sub-con­ti­nent: the last three indi­vid­u­als were report­ed­ly shot in 1947 by the Mahara­jah of Sur­gu­ja.