Portraits of Dogs at the Wallace Collection will make your tail wag
From taxidermy to Hockney’s adorable dachshunds, Portraits of Dogs, a new exhibition at the Wallace Collection, explores how the portrayal of our canine friends has changed over the centuries.
Three huge portraits greet you as you enter: George Stubbs’ ‘aristocratic dogs’, which are among the exhibition’s finest pieces. More than almost anyone else on display here, Stubbs seems to get us almost to the real dog.
Almost, but not quite. There’s an inherent tension here because portraits, by definition, are of humans, right? In many cases, seeing a dog in a portrait can’t help but make the dog appear more human than canine.
So how best to approach painting a dog? Hockney’s intensely personal paintings of Stanley and Boodgie captures how we feel about them in the modern world; Dog Painting 41, with its pastel green background, is painfully sweet.
Hockney painted his beloved dogs at a time of bereavement but his paintings tried to foreground love rather than loss. The colourful background and the dogs’ brute cuteness, for want of a better word, makes them feel more real than anything else in the exhibition.
A common theme throughout is the humanisation of dogs. In a room exploring ‘toy dogs’ – which became all the rage in 17th century France – we see elaborately groomed pooches standing on their hind legs.
Elsewhere we learn famed portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough used to write to his wife if he’d annoyed her pretending to be one of his dogs, Fox (bit weird?). The letter would then be delivered in the mouth of his other dog, Tristram (even weirder…).
There’s a room devoted to Edwin Landseer’s allegorical paintings. We see dogs recreating a court scene, with a “quite ridiculously large” Poodle standing judgement over his canine peers. In another of Landseer’s paintings a proud bulldog representing Alexander the Great meets a scruffy black dog, standing in for the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes.
All of these things – including Stubbs’ portraits – are at least a little ridiculous. Putting a dog into a classical style of portrait, as most of the works here do, can’t help but make them feel human.
There are shortcomings to this whistle stop tour of canine portraiture. It would have been interesting to get more of a sense of why, at the end of the 17th century, dogs were seen as legitimate objects of artistic attention when they had not been before. One Roman sculpture and a sketch of a dog’s paw by Da Vinci pretty much takes us through to the 17th century, but what in our mindset had changed?
Still, it’s a lot of fun, a knowingly silly exhibition that’s sure to make any dog-lover’s tail wag.