Faithful and Fearless: Portraits of Dogs

Faithful and Fearless

portraits of dogs

Faithful and Fearless portraits of dogs

Freud’s design for daughter Bella Freud’s fashion label. Poignantly, the artist’s final painting similarly features a dog: Eli the whippet, a Christmas gift from Freud to his assistant and close friend David Dawson (depicted alongside Eli in the work), and the great-great-niece of the beloved Pluto. Eli was said to have filled the gap left by Pluto in Freud’s final years (fig. 18). In 2002, he expanded upon their appeal to William Feaver, curator of his retrospective of that year, saying, ‘I am impressed by their lack of arrogance, their ready eagerness, their animal pragmatism’. They even impacted his portrayal of humans: ‘I’m really interested in people as animals.… Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason … I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto my whippet.’23 David Hockney painted a series of forty paintings of his dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie (cat. nos 32–37 and fig. 19), over a two-year period beginning in 1994. Almost like his muses, Hockney set up easels at different

22

Fa it h ful a n d F earl ess: Portraits of Dogs

fig. 18

Lucian Freud with Frank Auerbach’s Seated Female Nude and his dog Eli, 2010 PRIVATE COLLECTION

fig. 19

Portrait of David Hockney with dogs and dog paintings, March 1995 COLLECTION THE DAVID HOCKNEY FOUNDATION

heights all over his house, canvas and palettes ready with paint near where his dachshunds usually slept. When the dogs were ‘in position’, he’d rush over and do lightning-fast paintings of them before they moved. He painted hundreds of portraits of the pair as they napped and played. ‘I make no apologies for the apparent subject matter … these two dear little creatures are my friends’, Hockney wrote. Paintings and drawings of Stanley and Boodgie were published in 1998 in a book called David Hockney’s Dog Days. Hockney found great solace when painting his canine companions, particularly following the death of his close friend Henry Geldzahler: ‘I wanted desperately to paint something loving…. I felt such a loss of love I wanted to deal with it in some way. I realised I was painting my best friends, Stanley and Boodgie. They sleep with me: I’m always with them here. They don’t go anywhere without me and only occasionally do I leave them. They’re like little people to me. The subject wasn’t dogs but my love of the little creatures.’24

23

36

Fa it h ful a n d F earl ess: Portraits of Dogs

Catalogue

37

part 1

The Aristocratic Dog

‘the dog , i n d e p e n d e n t o f t h e beauty of his figure, his strength, vivacity, and nimbleness, possesses every internal excellence which can attract the regard of man’,41 stated the great naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), in his Histoire naturelle of 1755, a ground-breaking publication on natural history.

As the keeper of the menagerie of the French king Louis XV (r. 1715–74), Buffon witnessed the king’s love for his royal hunting dogs first hand. After finishing his daily obligations, the French king would usually retire to his study and personally feed his dogs – probably his favourite routine. Buffon and the king certainly agreed that the dog was ‘the most intelligent of all quadrupeds, and the acknowledged friend of mankind’42 and the noblest of species, thanks to his loyalty, bravery and utility.

Louis XV was not an isolated case: for centuries dogs have been prestigious members of European courts, and much loved by their owners. Naturally, they would be immortalised together with their noble masters in paintings, but until the eighteenth century individual portraits of dogs were rare. It was Louis XV’s great-grandfather, Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715), who was the first to commission a large number of individual portraits of royal hunting dogs. The painter of the royal hunt, Alexandre-François Desportes (1661–1743), captured the royal dogs in elegant poses going after prey. By including his sitters’ names in large gilt letters on the canvas, Desportes drew parallels to portraits of human rulers and clearly visualised the royal connection of the dogs.43 That the status of the hunting dog was reflected in individual portraits is not surprising. With Louis XIV, hunting had become a prestigious and highly ritualised large-scale social event: the number of staff needed was immense and the packs of dogs could be four hundred hounds at times. Despite being the king’s personal pleasure, the hunt had become of critical importance to the establishment of a social hierarchy and the display of royal power. It was within this environment that animal painting thrived, glorifying the individual characters in this spectacle.

Inheriting this passion for dogs from his great-grandfather Louis XIV, Louis XV was said to have ‘worked like a dog for his dogs’,44 knowing all the

46

Th e Ar is toc r at ic Dog

For centuries dogs have been prestigious members of European courts, and much loved by their owners.

Louis XV was said to have ‘worked like a dog for his dogs’, knowing all the names and breeds of each one.

names and breeds of each one. The king even insisted on being present when his favourites were portrayed by his preferred animal painter, Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755). Oudry moved away from Desportes’s depiction of dogs in the act of hunting and was more focused on capturing the beautiful bodies and disciplined minds of individual dogs such as Polydore (fig. 29), Pompée or Petite Fille in paintings for the king’s appartements at Compiègne.

At the Paris Salon of 1753, the official annual exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts, Oudry suddenly turned from named, aristocratic working dogs, employed by the king and the nobility, to a bitch hound with her young (Lice Feeding her Pups), portraying her with a paw raised protectively over her litter – a composition that was received enthusiastically by critics at the time (now in the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris). This painting became an object of devotion and was often referred to as ‘The Mother’, due to its parallels with depictions of the Holy Family. Although eighteenthcentury society was imbued with René Descartes’s (1596–1650) belief that animals don’t have a soul or the capacity for feelings, this absolute separation of humans from animals became harder and harder to maintain in view of the evidence provided by the maternal devotion of a bitch to her pups, or the intelligence displayed by a dog during the hunt.45 Shown at the Salon alongside history paintings with significant and emotionally touching scenes from human history, Oudry’s work struck a new chord of sensibility and contributed to the idea that there is perhaps not so much difference between the canine and human species after all.46 It was during the second half of the eighteenth century in England that dog portraiture as a genre on a broader scale started to flourish. Landowners and aristocrats were affluent enough to commission stand-alone portraits of their favourite dogs. English landowners had a very special and individual relationship to their dogs, perhaps due to the fundamentally different approach to hunting from that practised in France. Away from the forests, the carefully rehearsed laying-on of relays of hounds was impossible in the English countryside. Shooting was also a quieter and more solitary pursuit, carried out by an English squire with his keeper and a few dogs, stalking partridges.

The performance of the individual dog, rather than the pack, became much more important and was what determined the success of the hunt. Hunting dogs were treated as prized possessions and objects of interest in themselves, becoming a status symbol of landowning and the landed English aristocracy.

The unsurpassed master of the genre was George Stubbs (1724–1806). His extensive study of the anatomical make-up of animals through dissections, which he had documented with precise anatomical drawings, enabled him to bring portraits of single working dogs, and later lapdogs, to a new level of sophistication from the mid-1760s onwards. His intimate understanding of

47

66

Th e Roya l Dog

12

Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) Hector, Nero and Dash with the Parrot Lory, 1838 Oil on canvas, 120.3 x 150.3 cm THE ROYAL COLLECTION / HM QUEEN ELIZABETH II

Landseer here introduces us to Queen Victoria’s favourite dogs and parrot, the low viewpoint making us feel part of their sumptuous and privileged world.

Centre stage, reclining on a red felt settee, is Dash, the queen’s beloved spaniel. Behind, as if her male admirers or attendants, are Nero the greyhound and Hector the Scottish deerhound.

Handsome and beautifully poised, they appear civilised and well trained. As if in contrast with their perfect behaviour, Lory, the parrot, is shown cracking nuts and making a mess on the floor.

Queen Victoria described the painting as ‘the most beautiful thing imaginable’ when she saw it before it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1838. However, the reality was somewhat different: Dash was known to be very jealous of Hector, whom Victoria affectionately described as ‘gentle as a lamb, and very playful.’

67

32

David Hockney (b. 1937) Dog Painting 12, 1995 Oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm COLLECTION THE DAVID HOCKNEY FOUNDATION

102

Th e Art is t ’s Dog

33

David Hockney (b. 1937) Dog Painting 19, 1995 Oil on canvas, 46 x 65 cm COLLECTION THE DAVID HOCKNEY FOUNDATION

103

140

Th e Do g Immo rtal

52

Unknown maker ‘Minnie’ the Lulu Terrier, c. 1883 Taxidermy and Tunbridge ware THE AMELIA, ROYAL TUNBRIDGE WELLS

141

148

Un t il De at h

bruce fogle

A Vet’s Point of View

exactly what di d dogs do for a living before they learned to fetch balls, pose for Instagram snaps and ask us to tickle their chests? How did the scary wolf, our natural competitor, become the companionable dog? Are dogs really faithful and fearless, the best friends we’ve ever had? Why paint portraits of them? Why do we admire these portraits? Is it because of the artists’ skills or more because of the subject matter they paint?

One out of every three homes throughout Europe and North America houses at least one dog and, when our circumstances allow, over half of the inhabitants on these continents say they would like to live with a dog. Dogs are in ads for everything from detergents to insurance, in our phone and tablet picture libraries and in paintings on the walls of the best art galleries. Why? The rather prosaic answer is simple serendipity. The dog’s evolutionary needs and ours converged. They did so in obvious ways. For example, we’re both socially gregarious species. But, more interestingly, there are hidden reasons why we were – and still are – surprisingly beneficial to each other.

Dogs became ‘domesticated’ earlier than we thought fig. 39

Jean-Jacques Bachelier (1724–1806) Dog of the Havana Breed (detail), 1768 Oil on canvas, 69.8 x 91.1 cm BOWES MUSEUM, BARNARD CASTLE, CO. DURHAM

Just as genetic studies have revealed that the greatest diversity of human genes is found in Africa, where we evolved, recent studies of the genetics of isolated indigenous Chinese breeds have shown that dogs diverged from an extinct wolf species in China probably 40,000 years ago, long before our ancestors became agricultural and settled in permanent communities. Through travel, trade and conquest, descendants of some of these dogs reached Europe, leaving their genetic evidence in modern European working breeds such as the

149

ISBN 978-1-5272-8742-6

9 781527 287426