There was nothing fashionable about Stubbs' background or his bluff, no-nonsense temperament. He was born in 1724 in the port city of Liverpool, where his father treated leather for a living. Stubbs taught himself to paint and had modest local success as a portrait-painter by his early 20s. His private life was unconventional. He fathered four children between 1748 and 1755, but records don't indicate who the mother was. In 1756, he set up housekeeping outside Hull with Mary Spencer, reportedly his niece but also, apparently, his lover. Together the two engaged in the gruesome business of killing, bleeding, and dissecting horses, one layer of muscles at a time, which Stubbs painstakingly drew for his famous Anatomy. His interest in anatomy was sparked by an early commission to illustrate a manual on midwifery; his work in equine anatomy, in turn, clarified lingering confusions about the musculature of mammals. Anatomical drawings in hand, Stubbs shifted his base of operations to London. Like some picaresque hero in a Defoe novel, Stubbs the leather-worker's son quickly found a market for horse portraits among the wealthy landowners and horse fanciers of the British elite. His wonderful series "Mares and Foals" is a celebration of the horse-breeding business, at a time when interbreeding with Arabian and Turkish stallions from the Middle East had turned the British Thoroughbred into a marvel of grace and speed. At the same time, the linked horses resemble a sculpted Neoclassical frieze, almost musical in their orderly rhythms of attachment and balance.