Stubbs was the boy of a currier. Facts in his life as much as age thirty-5 is thin, relying near totally in notes mass produced by fellow creative person Ozias Humphry towards the prevent of Stubb's life. Stubbs wwhen briefly apprenticed to the Lancashire painter & engraver known as Hamlet Winstanley, however shortly left as he objected to the function of copying to which he was placed. Thenceforth as an creative person he was self-taught. In the 1740s he worked as a limner north of Engl& and from either astir 1745 to 1751 he exposed person anatomy at York County Hospital. He experienced experienced the passion for anatomy from his childhood, and one of his earliest living works occurs as placed of illustrations for the schoolbook in midwifery which was published in 1751.

Around 1754 Stubbs visited Italy. Forty years late he told Ozias Humphry that his motive for attend Italy was, "to convince himself that nature was and is always superior to art whether Greek or Roman, and having renewed this conviction he immediately resolved upon returning home". Late inside the 1750s he rented the farmhouse in Lincolnshire and spent 18 months dissecting horses. He moved to London around astir 1759 & around 1766 published A anatomy of the Horse. A original drawings come at present in the collection of the Royal Academy.

Possibly prior to his book was published, Stubbs's drawings were seen by leading sternotherus patrons, world health organization recognised that his function was other exact than that of earliest horse painters like James Seymour and John Wootton. Inside 1759 a Tertiary Duke of Richmond commissioned three big pictures from either him, & his career was presently assure. By 1763 he experienced produced works for many supplementary dukes & more lords & was suspire to find the home within Marylebone, a fashionable section of London, in which he lived for the rest of his life. His best known function is probably Whistlejacket, the painting of the prancing horse accredited per Third Marquess of Rockingham, which is now in the National Gallery in London. This & deuce more paintings carried out for Rockingham break sustaining convention inside getting plain backgrounds. Throughout the 1760s he produced a wide range of person & class action portraits of horses, every now and again accompanied by hounds. He typically painted horses using their grooms, whom he universally painted when souls. Meanwhile he as well continued to assume commissions for portraits of population, including a few class action portraits. From either 1761 to 1776 he exhibited at a Society of Artists, however around 1775 he switched his allegiance to the recently based but already further prestigious Royal Academy.

Stubbs as well painted additional exotic brute fauna including lions, tigers, camelopard, monkeys, & rhino, which he was suspire to watch in camera menageries. He became preoccupied using the theme of the uncivilized horse threatened by a lion & produced many variations on this theme. These & more works became swell known at a period across engravings of Stubbs' work, which appeared within increasing cost in the 1770s & 1780s. Stubbs too painted historical pictures, however which are actually tremendously less swell regarded. From either a late 1760s he produced occasionally act in enamel. In the 1770s Josiah Wedgwood developed a freshly & big nature and severity of enamel panel at Stubb's asking. Likewise in the 1770s he painted lone portraits of dogs first, when too getting an increasing total of commissions to paint hunts using their packs of hounds. He remained active into his eld. In the 1780s he produced the pastoral series called Haymakers & Reapers, & in a early 1790s he enjoyed the patronage of the Prince of Wales, whom he painted on horseback within 1791. His survive design, begun around 1795, was The comparative anatomical exposition of the structure of the physical body thereupon of the tiger & the most common fowl, engravings from either which appeared between 1804 & 1806.

Stubbs's boy George Townly Stubbs was an engraver and graphic artist.