Dog Names with Character

To name a dog is to write the first line of his portrait. A small canon of dog names drawn from art, for anyone still searching for one with character.

In the atelier dog names pass by every day, and the plaque beneath the frame never lies: a name decides the way you look at the animal. "Scamp" hangs differently on the wall than "Hogarth". For anyone still searching — a new puppy, a rehomed dog without papers — here are the names that hold up best on our workbench.

From painting: William Hogarth’s pug was called Trump and has sat beside him in the self-portrait since 1745 — a name with nearly three centuries of service. Picasso shared his house for six years with the dachshund Lump. And the two dogs in Landseer’s best-known canvas were called Grafton and Scratch: dignity and impudence, summed up in two names.

From music: Edward Elgar wrote the eleventh Enigma variation not about the organist it is dedicated to, but about his bulldog Dan — who fell down the bank into the River Wye, paddled upstream to find a landing place, and barked in relief on reaching dry ground. Name your dog Dan and you hand him an orchestra.

A name is the first thing a dog learns from you and the last thing he forgets.

From literature: Argos waited twenty years for Odysseus and was the only one to know him — not a name to take lightly. Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, was given a biography of his own by Virginia Woolf. And the classics — Bella, Max, Bruno — need feel no shame: they are the folk art among dog names.

And then the style, because a name chooses its own room. Grafton asks for a court portrait; Lump for a flat, modern line; Dan for something with bravado. If you already have the name, all that is left in the style gallery is to listen to what the plaque will have to carry.

Three pointers from practice. First: choose a name you dare to call out loud on a crowded dog field. Second: choose a name that does not sound like a command — at fifty metres, "Nero" and "no" sit closer together than you would like. And third: choose a name that still fits ten years on. Puppies become dogs, and "Titch" hangs awkwardly beneath a stately portrait.

— the atelier