One of the hardest things to understand in 18^th-century European art is how Neoclassical and Romantic tendencies can exist in the same artist, whether David or Goya, William Blake or Stubbs. At the same time that Stubbs was painting his peaceful mares and nursing foals—"equine utopias," as the scholar Malcolm Warner has called them—he was dreaming up a contrasting image of violence: a stallion attacked by a lion. In 1754, Stubbs had made the obligatory young artist's journey to Rome. Convinced that he could learn more from direct scientific observation of animals than from the marble copies by idealizing artists, he cut his visit short, but probably not before seeing a Hellenistic sculpture of a lion sinking his teeth into a horse's back. Stubbs insisted, however, that during a stopover in Morocco on his return journey, he had actually seen a lion attacking a splendid white "barb" (or Barbary horse). During the next 20 years, Stubbs returned again and again to the gory encounter, sometimes accentuating its terrifying or "sublime" aspects, and sometimes giving it a more restrained Neoclassical decorum. Blake, who moved in the same circles as Stubbs and knew his paintings of wild cats, wrote, "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." In Stubbs' fantasy, though, the horses, representing civilization and scientific "instruction," won the battle over their feral predators.