Cat. 01
Jan van Eyck
The Arnolfini Portrait
A catalog of canonical works · 30 entries Vol. I · 2024 edition
Famous Dog
Paintings.
A scholarly catalog of the most consequential dog paintings in Western art, drawn from museum and major private collections — from Velázquez's mastiff to Bonnard's terraces — with editorial commentary on each work and notes on where to find good reproductions.
Part of the Pet Pic Portraits library of art references. Affiliate links are disclosed throughout.
§ 01
The Featured Ten
Ten paintings that anchor the canon — the ones art-historical surveys return to, and the works most often reproduced as prints. Listed roughly in chronological order.
Cat. 04
Diego Velázquez
Las Meninas
Cat. 05
William Hogarth
The Painter and His Pug
Cat. 09
George Stubbs
A Couple of Foxhounds
Cat. 10
Francisco Goya
The Dog
Cat. 14
Sir Edwin Landseer
Dignity and Impudence
Cat. 17
Édouard Manet
King Charles Spaniel
Cat. 20
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Madame Charpentier and Her Children
Cat. 25
Arthur Wardle
The Totteridge XI
Cat. 27
Pierre Bonnard
The Terrasse Family (L'Après-midi bourgeois)
The full catalog continues with twenty further entries.
View the full catalog →"The dog has been in the painter's studio almost as long as the painter has. To trace its appearance across six centuries of Western art is to trace, in miniature, a history of what we have wanted painting to do."
— From the curator's introduction§ 02
Browse by period
Period I
Renaissance
1400 — 1700
The dog enters the picture as a symbol of fidelity and a marker of nobility, attentive at the edges of grand allegory and at the feet of royal sitters.
Period II
Sporting Age
1700 — 1800
The age of the sporting portrait. Stubbs gives the hunting dog the same anatomical seriousness he gives the racehorse; Reynolds and Hogarth bring the parlor pet to studio scale.
Period III
Victorian
1800 — 1900
The century in which the dog moves from the margins of the canvas to its center. Landseer's sentimental portraiture defines a whole school; Goya and Manet pull the subject toward modern feeling.
Period IV
Modernist
1860 — 1929
Painters take the dog as a question of form rather than allegory. The breed portraitists Wardle and Earl raise show-dog likeness to studio standard; the post-Impressionists fold the pet into domestic interiors and modern color.
§ 03
Where to find reproductions
A short list of prints and reproduction sources we return to when researching this catalog. Stock and pricing vary; links are affiliate. The mockups below represent a typical framed-print presentation; the retailer page is the source of truth on size and finish.
Etsy
Framed reproduction
See all sources →
AllPosters
Framed reproduction
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Amazon
Framed reproduction
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1stDibs
Framed reproduction
See all sources →§ 04
About this catalog.
This site is a working catalog rather than a museum. We restrict ourselves to paintings (no sculpture, no photography) in which the dog is meaningfully present — sometimes as the sole subject, sometimes as a structural figure in a larger composition. Each entry includes the artist, title, year, medium and collection of record, together with a short editorial note.
Where a reproduction is widely available we link to the better print sources. Where it is not, we say so. Affiliate links throughout; see methodology for selection criteria.
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