During his lifetime, George Stubbs was famous for his paintings of domestic and exotic animals, and was thought to have produced the most anatomically precise images of horses. Stubbs was an avid student of anatomy, having contributed illustrations to a treatise on midwifery and his own publication The Anatomy of the Horse in 1766—a hugely influential volume among naturalists and artists alike. Though he painted genre scenes, landscapes, and history paintings with less success, Stubbs was characterized as a sporting painter and denied membership to the Royal Academy for lack of rigor in his subject. Few of his paintings survive undamaged because Stubbs painted with thin and diluted oils.