The zebra in this painting was owned by Queen Charlotte and was the sole survivor of a pair brought back from Southern Africa in 1762 by Sir Thomas Adams, the commanding officer of HMS Terpsichore. Though it wasn’t the first zebra on British shores—Prince Frederick had kept zebras at Kew in the 1740s—it was certainly the most visible. Charlotte’s zebra lived in a paddock near Buckingham House, where it was made available to a public with a thirst for exotic animals, spawning several, sometimes bawdy, tributes to “the Queen’s she-ass.” Beyond satire and public curiosity, the zebra was the subject of great scientific interest, as evidenced by Stubbs’s meticulously painted portrait, which may have been made with the assistance of the anatomists William and John Hunter. Stubbs’s incongruous setting (more forest glade than tended paddock) creates an air of melancholy, suggesting both the wonder and the costs of the Enlightenment.
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