Description:
From "Drawing Book in Imitation of Chalk"

Label Text:
Benjamin Green ranks as one of the earliest English engravers to use the technique of soft-ground etching—a medium that captures the appearance of chalk drawings. Green’s position as engraver to the University of Oxford provided opportunities to share the technique with other artists, including Gainsborough and Stubbs.

Here Green reproduced a celebrated subject by Stubbs inspired by an ancient Greek sculpture: a lion attacking a horse, a motif that the legendary animal painter depicted in oils and enamels, etchings and mezzotints, and even clay. The subject represents Stubbs’s response to an academic art-training system that esteemed paintings of historical and literary subjects above all others: Stubbs incorporated dramatic tension and classical illusions into his animal paintings, thereby creating the hybrid genre that Basil Taylor memorably dubbed “animal history.”
EEB

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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2009.215

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