Horse Frightened by a Lion depicts a majestic stallion in a very different situation. Stubby painted this magnetic masterpiece to illustrate the nature of the sublime, which was one of his era's most popular philosophical concepts, and its relation to a timelessly riveting feeling: fear. The magnificent horse galloping through a vast wilderness encounters the bottom-up stimulus of a crouching predator and responds with a dramatic display of what psychologists mildly call "negative emotion." The equine superstar's arched neck, dilated eyes, and flared nostrils are in fact the very picture of overwhelming dread. The painting's subject reflects the philosopher Edmund Burke's widely circulated Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which asserts that because "terror" is unparalleled in commanding "astonishment," or total, single-pointed,--indeed, rapt--attention, it is "the ruling principle of the sublime.