died, and his reassess-ment has lifted him to the level of the greatest of his'time. His life has been fairly described as heroic. The son of a Liverpool currier, he supported himself at the begin-ning of his career" in northern England by painting por-traits, but at the same time started on his study of anatomy, animal and human, that was to prove not only vitally im-portant to his art but also a new contribution to science. Stubbs was one of the great English empiricists. He took a farm-house in Lincolnshire and in it, over eighteen months, he grappled with the anatomy of the horse.