Before the advent of the motor car, gentlemen of fashion could be recognised through the quality of their horses, carriages and grooms. The art of horse breeding, training and stabling developed throughout Europe to a high and ‘international’ standard. Illustrations in the Duke of Newcastle’s Methode et invention nouvelle de dresser les chevaux, published in 1658, not only showed extraordinary feats of horsemanship but also the Duke’s stables at Welbeck Abbey, which incorporated a much better system of drainage and ventilation than was available to the human population.

What is prized is also usually painted. This group displays a remarkably coherent group of seventeenth-century Dutch and eighteenth-century English ‘mews’ scenes, illustrating stables, grooms, carriages and horses. George Stubbs was one of the greatest equestrian artists in history, but his paintings owe much to those of his Dutch predecessors, as well as to his revolutionary study of the anatomy of the horse.