# A Horse Affrighted by a Lion

- By: George Stubbs (English, 1724-1806)
- Date: September 25, 1777
- Medium: Etching and engraving on cream laid paper
- Classification: Print
- Dimensions: Image: 34.1 × 45.9 cm (13 7/16 × 18 1/8 in.); Sheet: 36.5 × 47.7 cm (14 3/8 × 18 13/16 in.)
- Culture: England
- Credit line: Gift of Dorothy Braude Edinburg to the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection
- Museum: [Art Institute of Chicago](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/141454)
- Rights: [Public domain (CC0)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://invisiblenetwork.ai/thumbs/web/b63278917e2be2b4611bdafc2fb5d641.jpg
- Who can see it: Little Ones profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

George Stubbs specialized in painting horses, and he frequently invested his compositions with Romantic flair by including ravenous predators and dark and stormy vistas. As seen here, his prints offered appropriately stark contrasts for these imaginative subjects while maintaining a sense of the dramatic; yet his practice of animal portraiture was in fact based on close anatomical study. His oversize 1766 book Anatomy of the Horse included a series of crosssection prints of horses in various poses, showing every layer from a horse’s silky hide to its skeleton.

Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0