Dogs Get an Art-World Belly Rub at London’s Wallace Collection

Its first exhibition on dog portraits shows that heaven on earth is a dog’s pure, total love.

P ortraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney is the Wallace Collection’s version of museum love in return for thousands of years of puppy love from humanity’s best friend. I always visit the Wallace Collection whenever I’m in London. Along with the National Portrait Gallery, it’s my favorite museum in Britain. It’s London’s Frick, only more sumptuous.

Portraits of Dogs, with about 50 works of art, is the first survey of dog portraiture, so we can now say “every dog’s finally having his day,” and after all that puppy love and puppy-dog looks, it’s about time. It’s a charming, intuitive exhibition.

I love dogs — we’ve always had schnauzers — and have to say I’m shocked that it took so long to have an exhibition on dog portraiture. Yes, they’ve not the best manners, but theirs are better than most children’s. They bark at strangers, falling leaves, and shadows. Is it a class thing? Dogs, after all, love their master or mistress whether the person’s tagged a sinner, failure, or dope, whether home’s a palace or a hovel. Is it the revenge of the cat ladies?

A few years ago, I reviewed New York’s new Museum of the Dog, attached to the main office of the American Kennel Club, and enjoyed it. Maybe this new museum paved the way, but art isn’t its calling card. In the auction world, dog pictures sell at sporting and wildlife sales, a puzzlement since almost all dogs now are family pets and they’ve been domesticated for at least 14,000 years. Still, sporting and wildlife art are in the culture periphery. Curators can be the most ruthless of snobs.

With the Wallace Collection show, dogs have gone high-art. Portraits of Dogs is divided into eight compact sections. Though the show’s title limits the chronology to “Gainsborough to Hockney,” the show starts with The Townley Greyhounds from around a.d. 100, a marble sculpture of two astonishingly lifelike dogs, one sweetly nibbling her companion’s ear. We’re off to the dog races. This section is about close observation of dogs. There’s a Leonardo drawing of the left forepaw of what’s possibly a large deerhound. It’s from the early 1490s and depicts the paw from different angles.

Pieter Boel’s Head of a Hound, from the early 1660s, is a riveting close-up profile. Boel is Flemish but worked for years for Louis XIV. This dog’s got presence. Only 10 by 13 inches, it sparkles with detail and personality, as he seems to be looking up toward his master. For years, art historians thought this was by Velázquez for its dark background and Spanish intensity.

The museum’s temporary exhibition space, added around 20 years ago, is a long, tunnel gallery and far from ideal. Like the Frick, the Wallace Collection is in a stately city mansion made into a museum that focused on a family collection and didn’t imagine loan shows. So it improvised. It doesn’t matter which way visitors go. I headed toward a giant poodle portrait hanging on the wall at the very end of the tunnel space. It’s Edwin Landseer’s Trial by Jury, or Laying Down the Law, from 1840, a painting from a collection at Chatsworth House. It’s in a section called “The Allegorical Dog” — all Landseers — in which we see dogs used as metaphors for social classes occupied by humans. The poodle looks like the wigged judge presiding over Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House.

In Uncle Tom, from 1857, Landseer riffs on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a bestseller in both America and the U.K. Two vulnerable pugs, looking like a husband and wife, are chained and, it seems, about to be separated in a sale. A tear falls from the smaller dog’s eye. A knotted whip hangs from the wall beside them. This won’t have a happy ending. Not all Victorian novels do.

George Stubbs is as great a dog painter as he is a horse painter. Landseer, and there’s a lot of Landseer in the show, is the Norman Rockwell of the canine world. He’s a narrative, anecdotal artist. Stubbs is a pure portraitist. Dogs might love uncritically and with little interest in caste, but among aristocrats, breeding mattered. Ringwood, from 1792, shows the sire who launched a prestigious bloodline of foxhounds. Turk, a Eurasian spitz or Japanese Akita, belonged to the Duke of Rutland. Stubbs painted him in 1778. He’s majestic, certainly, in stance and imperious eyes but what a coat. He’s not one for bad-fur days.

There’s a section on artists’ dogs. Gainsborough’s Tristram and Fox, from around 1780, shows lots of love on the painter’s part. Rosa Bonheur was one of her era’s great animal painters. Brizo, from 1864, looks like a French otterhound and invites a head scratch with his sweet intelligence and shaggy coat.

A section on royal dogs focuses on Queen Victoria. Victoria and Albert loved their dogs. Her King Charles spaniel Dash, his breed named for her decapitated ancestor, got a lovely epitaph on his grave marker near Adelaide Cottage at Windsor:

His attachment was without selfishness, His playfulness without malice, His fidelity without deceit. READER, if you would live beloved and die regretted, profit by the example of DASH.

More poetic than Harry Truman’s “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,” but the sentiment’s the same.

Looty, a Pekingese dog, came to Queen Victoria as a gift in 1860 after British soldiers plundered Beijing’s imperial palace. In one of the exhibition’s few odd moments, the label notes that “the dogs became souvenirs of brutal colonial conquest.” This is silly. The line’s not in the catalogue, written by the Wallace Collection’s brilliant director, Xavier Bray, and must have oozed from the museum’s education office. Of all the crimes imagined by lefty dolts who claim to teach, trafficking in Pekingese dogs is the most fanciful.

There’s a small section on Pekingese portraits. I know, this is London, and an haut-bourgeois part of London, but I’m from Vermont. We like our dogs on the rough-and-tumble side. Meet Augie, our four-year-old standard schnauzer. He’s happy his ancestors came to America from Germany, where they caught rats, chased cattle, guarded breweries, and were bred with German shepherds for police work. Think the Gestapo and the Stasi. If his forebears were spirited away, appropriated, or compelled to assimilate, well, that suits him just fine. He doesn’t give a bowwow about colonialism.

The exhibition ends with two spaces. One, Until Death, is anchored by Landseer’s The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner, from 1837. We’ve all heard stories about dogs making a master’s deathbed or grave into a shrine. This painting is lovely and poignant and true. An entire gallery is carved out for David Hockney’s mid-’90s paintings of his dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie. “They live for food and love, in that order,” Hockney once said, and I can’t quibble with that. Hockney painted more than 30 portraits of the two. Five are on view, along with a big wall-mural photo showing Hockney with all of his dog paintings as well as his two subjects.

The British love Hockney, but I don’t, and while I have a warm and soft spot for all dogs, that spot cools and hardens when I see a dachshund. Like Pekingese dogs, they seem very contrived and unfun.

I enjoyed Portraits of Dogs but here and there found myself in a questioning state of mind. What about Dookie and Crackers, the first corgis in the Windsor line, or Susan, from whom descended a platoon of them? She was the young Princess Elizabeth’s first Pembroke Welsh corgi. Yes, they’re bitey, and over the years the Queen’s dogs bit the postman, the chauffeur, and Her Majesty herself, and a pack of them killed her dorgi, Chipper. Still, the image of Queen and corgi, side by side, was ubiquitous. After all, Queen Alexandra’s borzoi and Edward VII’s Norfolk terrier are included, rendered by no less than Fabergé.

Winston Churchill never had an English bulldog but did have the breed’s fleshy jowls and tenacity, and how many toby jugs showed Churchill and a bulldog, again, side by side? Then we’ve got Toto, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Snoopy, Old Yeller, and not one but 101 Dalmatians.

Granted, the material’s substantial. At the Wallace Collection alone, 907 works of art show a dog, and it’s not a big museum. Extrapolate this number to museums just in Britain — it’s likely endless. So, given the Wallace Collection’s limited special-exhibition space, it made two golden rules in organizing Portraits of Dogs. First, no people allowed in the art. Second, the art’s got to come from British collections. I’d quibble with the second since it excludes the best American dog painter: Winslow Homer, all of whose dog pictures are in America.

I’d question the first since people and dogs enhance one another, and, let’s face it, dogs are family. And, Landseer’s Hector, Nero, and Dash, from 1838, a grand painting of Victoria’s dogs befitting a Van Dyke, includes a parrot. John Singer Sargent’s 1902 portrait of Asher Wertheimer’s three children includes a fourth “child,” a black poodle bedecked with ribbons. Sargent, by the by, is a fantastic dog painter. John Singleton Copley’s The Western Brothers, from 1783, is the best example of a dog as a god of frolic.

Cutting the number of Landseers — Portraits of Dogs flirts with becoming a Landseer show — and reducing Hockney’s place to three dachshund pictures, plus axing Queen Victoria’s quaint but modest drawings of her dogs would have freed space for pictures of dogs with people as well as great things from the museum’s own collection, such as Oudry’s The Dog, from 1751, an animal with French panache.

William Wegman, who photographs Weimaraners in various poses, is probably the best-known American artist. Some Americans might not know his name, but everyone knows his art.

Not to be picky, but most of the Landseers aren’t really portraits. They’re genre pictures, or scenes of everyday. They’re models. A portrait displays the features, personality, or mood of the specific sitter. Not a big deal. To love a dog, and we love ours, puts me in a forgiving frame of mind.

Putting all of this aside, it’s a lovely, ingratiating exhibition with a catalogue and essay by Bray, who is a very good scholar. It illustrates some of the things I wish were included in the show, for the public to see. Bruce Fogle, a practicing veterinarian in London, wrote a nice essay on the evolution of dogs. Bray’s pug, Bluebell, gets her dose of fame with a sweet photo at the end of the book. May more exhibitions come from this. It’s scholarship that makes people happy. That’s like a good nuzzle and a wagging tail.