The Dog in Painting

At first he was allowed only to lie at his master’s feet, as an emblem of loyalty. Four centuries later he hangs in the frame himself.

The dog entered painting through the servants’ door. In the sixteenth-century court portrait he was an attribute: around 1529 Titian painted Federico II Gonzaga with a Maltese under his hand — the sign of faithfulness — and in 1533 he set Emperor Charles V beside a large hound. Both canvases hang in the Prado. The animal was there to say something about the man.

With Velázquez that begins to tilt. In Las Meninas (1656, the Prado again) a Spanish mastiff lies across the foreground, and while half the court stands posing — the infanta, the maids of honour, the painter himself — the dog simply sleeps on, even with someone’s foot on his flank. He is the one creature on the canvas making no effort at all, and at the same time the anchor of the whole composition.

The eighteenth century completes the move. In 1745 William Hogarth painted his self-portrait with his pug Trump beside it — now in Tate Britain — and let the resemblance between owner and dog stand quite deliberately: the animal’s stubborn head stood for his own appetite for a fight. In Dutch genre painting, meanwhile, the dog had long since come indoors. With Jan Steen, who lent his name to the disorderly household, a dog barks cheerfully along with the chaos in "Children Teaching a Cat to Dance" (Rijksmuseum).

A dog does not pose. That is exactly why he is so good to paint.

In the nineteenth century the animal becomes the protagonist. In 1839 Edwin Landseer hung a bloodhound and a much smaller terrier in a single frame — Grafton and Scratch, "Dignity and Impudence", Tate — and painted Newfoundlands so often that the black-and-white variety has been called a Landseer ever since: probably the only painter with a dog breed to his name. A century and a half later David Hockney filled an entire book with his two dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie, adding the dry observation that dogs take no interest in art, and that food and affection fill their days.

What does that mean for a portrait made today? Mainly this: the tradition is already there, and all you choose is which room to stand in. Anyone after the court hall of Titian and Velázquez arrives at The Renaissance or The Aristocrat. Anyone who would rather stand beside Hockney — flat, bright, wilful — finds that in Modernist Muse. The dog has been lying there for four hundred years. The only new thing is that he may now sit in the middle.

— the atelier