Cleveland Museum of Art

A Sleeping Leopard

Date

1791

Medium

Soft-ground etching with roulette work

Culture

England, 18th century

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

A famed animal painter, George Stubbs studied anatomy and likely had access to one of London’s various menageries, where he could view animals kept as curiosities and brought to England from across the globe. Here, Stubbs used innovative printmaking techniques to capture the roughness of the tree bark, the rocky surface of the ground, and the softness of the leopard’s fur. Stubbs was one of the earliest artists to experiment with soft-ground etching, which allowed him to re-create texture by transferring his image onto a printing plate through an actual drawing. George Stubbs carefully studied the different animals he depicted and even published a book on the anatomy of the horse.

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