The Holburne’s portrait by George Stubbs of The Rev. Robert Carter Thelwall, his wife Charlotte Nelthorpe and their daughter Charlotte has returned to Lincolnshire for the summer.
Until 27 September it will be on display at the Usher Gallery in Lincoln as part of Lincolnshire’s Great Exhibition, a celebration of the 800th anniversary of Lincoln’s copy of Magna Carta. The exhibition, spread over four venues in the city, celebrates the county’s role in history through magnificent works of art made in Lincolnshire (such as the extraordinary Luttrell Psalter) and the local heroes who have left their mark on history, from St Hugh to Margaret Thatcher, via Newton, Wesley and Tennyson.
Lincolnshire and its landed gentry were of key importance to George Stubbs, much of whose work was commissioned by the hunting and horse-racing patrons of the county. Among these was the Nelthorpe family, who encouraged the Liverpool-born artist to work on his extraordinary Anatomy of the Horse. Charlotte Nelthorpe later married the local parson and landowner Robert Carter, and it is their marriage that the Holburne’s portrait celebrates.
Our Stubbs is now hanging in Lincoln’s Usher Gallery, in a room dedicated to the artist and his wonderful portraits of local horses and hounds, many of them lent from Lincolnshire country houses. The Usher was designed in the 1920s by none other than Sir Reginald Blomfield, building on his success with the Holburne Museum in 1916.