back in England, he took himself and his mistress off to a cottage in the lincolnshire village of Horkstow/ There he proceeded to bleed selected horses to death from the jugualr. He then injected the cadavers with warm tallow to perserve the form of pulsing veins and arteries (hence their perfect rending in his paintings) Finally, he suspended them in a standing or trotting pose from a contraption of hooks and tackles bolted to the celling and, amid the vile slop and stench, worked his way through the flayed carcass, muscle by muscle, bone by bone. It took eleven weeks to get through a single horse, and there were many of them.

Simon Schama on Stubbs, nyer, 3/5/07