The Dog: 5000 Years of the Dog in Art, by Tamsin Pickeral
Dogs: History, Myth, Art, by Catherine Johns
The Horse: A Celebration of Horses in Art, by Rachel and Simon Barnes
These three books are concerned with the representation in art of man’s most successfully domesticated wild animals,: the dog and the horse. Dogs, as carnivores, domesticated themselves as early as 14000 BC, picking up scraps of meat left lying around by our prehistoric ancestors. Horses, as herbivores, were not attracted to such scraps. They were captured in the wild and broken in. Dogs were Jacks-of-all-trades. They were guardians of our houses (a Pompeiian mosaic from the second century AD of a fierce dog bears the inscription ‘Beware of the Dog’); they herded our sheep and cattle; and, above all, they acted as aids in hunting for sport or meat.
This co-operative enterprise was celebrated in art from Babylon, through ancient Greece and Rome, to the present day. From the 18th century onwards, in Britain, there must be hundreds of pictures of meets and famous runs of celebrated packs of fox-hounds, the more mediocre now banished to the attics of great country houses. As late as the 1940s, Sir Alfred Munnings, a fashionable and gifted painter of horses and hounds, and himself an enthusiastic fox-hunter, was elected President of the Royal Academy of Arts.
The evident conclusion to be drawn from these three books is that the horse has declined as an object of art, and the dog has advanced, as aristocratic and monarchical societies become consumer democracies. Horses are aristocratic and expensive to keep at livery; dogs are democratic and cheap. Van Dyck, Titian and Velasquez painted kings on horseback. Our present Queen is known to the mass of her subjects as the breeder of Welsh corgis. George Stubbs, whose portraits of horses and dogs have made him famous to a wide public today, was patronised by the 18th-century Whig grandee, Lord Rockingham. The relative decline of the horse in art was inevitable once it had lost its main functions. First, it was an instrument of war. There is Uccello’s wonderful painting of horses in battle during the war of 1342 between Florence and Siena. The horse was replaced by the tank in the 1914 war, just as its earlier function, as an essential means of transport, had been made obsolescent by the steam engine and later by the motor car. It flourished in sports and amusements, particularly in racing. There are the splendid Degas pictures of racehorses galloping, and Dufy’s facile sketches of Ascot, and, in the Barnes’ book, a striking Picasso of a circus horse and its trainer. There is also a Kandinsky and the inevitable Franz Marc’s ‘Blue Horse’.
Over some 5,000 years, as Rudyard Kipling put it, dogs have become man’s best friend. From a Greek pot painting of 200 BC of a dog scratching its ear to Lucian Freud and Elizabeth Frink, dogs have been treated with affection. They have an advantage over horses. Noble animals the latter might be, but they were too bulky for the boudoir. In Titian’s great nude, the ‘Venus of Urbino’ (1590), the companion of Venus on the couch is a small dog.By the 16th century, dogs appear everywhere in paintings. The most famous early example is Jan van Eyck’s ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’, painted in 1434. The wife has a dog at her feet. In Carpaccio’s ‘Vision of St Anthony’ (1502), a small dog looks at the saint from a distance, and in his portrait of two Venetian courtesans, one fondles two dogs; in Leandro Bassano’s ‘The Rich Man and Lazarus’ (1590), there are two dogs licking a beggar’s feet. Paintings of dogs became a standard device to fill up space in large paintings.
The painters and sculptors of the Renaissance were realists, fascinated by the enormous variety of canine breeds. It was left to the romantics to indulge in anthropomorphism, attributing to dogs human virtues and capacities. Sir Edwin Landseer, the greatest painter of animals of the Victorian era, has a dog guarding the dead body of his master who had come to grief ion the Cumbrian mountains; but he also has a dog playing cards, entitled ‘The Trickster’. This was to push anthropomorphism beyond reasonable limits. Victorians dressed dogs in military uniforms. But this sentimentalism had a market value. Just as a beautiful child blowing bubbles was a successful advertisement for Pears soap, so a dog listening absorbed to a gramophone horn was a much-loved brand image for His Master’s Voice records.
The Barnes’ book weighs nearly four kilos, and its large two-page spreads allow splendid images of horses. Many of them will be familiar to anyone who has an interest in animal art. Tamsin Pickeral, and Catherine Johns in a scholarly book from the British Museum Press, cast their nets widely in both time and space about dogs. They span The Egyptian Book of the Dead, written in 1275 BC, and a sketch of George du Maurier’s daughter exercising her dog in Kensington Gardens. Johns includes fine ceramics and jewellery. She has some superb Japanese 18th- century ivory netsuke figures of dogs (as well as a hideous Japanese china dog made in 2001), a magnificent Anglo-Saxon purse lid from Sutton Hoo, and a dagger made in Mughal India c. 1625.
It was only when I came to live in London and walked in Hyde Park that I realised that I was a dog-lover living in a dog-loving country. The only dog-hater I have known was the late John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls College, Oxford. Pickeral has an extremely valuable ‘timeline’, showing how dogs came to occupy a place in modern literature and art. After Cruft’s first show in 1880, dogs entered celebrity culture in annual shows that were eventually to be watched by millions on television. My first dog, given to me in 1924, was a Sealyham terrier, then a fashionable breed. William Sansom, the gifted short-story writer would muse on our travels in the 1950s: ‘Where have all the Sealyhams gone?’ They had not died of some catastrophic plague but had been replaced by Border terriers as desirable companions.
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