George Stubbs was really good at horse anatomy.

10,000 hours of dissecting horse carcasses in somebody else’s barn will do that for you. He was not apparently as good at plotting escape routes: the king’s horse is up a creek. A predictive metaphor for monarchy if I’ve ever seen one, but what does that say about the people who will end up doing the ruling?

Stubbs, it is said (though not, suspiciously, by Stubb’s biographer) actually watched a lion attack and dismember a horse by the light of the moon in Ceueta, Morocco. It seems too much like a romantic poet’s wet dream to be historical fact and a sober historian from Tate Britain says he was more likely inspired by a Roman sculpture during his time in Italy. That’s the BORING version. I prefer Sporting Magazine’s account of Stubbs in an undertaker’s rapture standing next to an unnamed African gentleman with “similar tastes and pursuits in life,” watching a lion tear the bowels out of a white barberry horse next to a moat. Who really needs “facts” and “quality journalism” when they can have carnage instead?

The American public definitely has no need for for accuracy but Stubbs was psychotic for it; blame the Age of Reason, his time as a student of anatomy, or general weirdness. In order to get the expression right on the King George III’s thoroughbred he had a well-connected architect friend attack the horse periodically with a broom so that he could sketch the horse’s face when it was terrified for its life.

The animal abuse seems to have been effective. Horace Walpole, considered the father of gothic literature, wrote a little poem about this painting in which he praises “Thy pencil Stubbs no rival need fear/not mimic art but life itself is here.” Translation: nice work drawing this horse, my man. It’s fitting that this painting—imminent death of beauty at the hands of terror, metaphor for 18th century British politics, created with actual mistreatment of animals—is celebrated most highly by a Brit who bought a charming cottage from a woman who sold toys and desecrated it into a plaster forgery of a castle so peculiar he had to invent a word to describe it’s atmosphere: gloomth.