Dog Art and Chick Pics

Abstract

Dog Art and Chick Pics Alison Syme (bio) The turn of the century was the "heyday"1 of dog painting and associated popular prints in Britain and Europe. Artists producing pet, purebred, and sporting dog portraits as well as genre scenes attracted diverse audiences and buyers, from those primarily concerned with the finer "points" (assessable breed-specific features) of prize-winning canines to those who appreciated "nature," whether in the form of violent hunting scenes or more humorous and/or humane compositions. Typically, dog portraits offered a steady income for artists who also made subject pictures in which they could more freely pursue their own artistic agendas, as Maud Earl's "symphonies" of white collies in snow and her Symbolist Dogs of Death for the 1900 Royal Academy indicate.2 Although our understanding of art at the turn of the century has become more inclusive, the sentimentality late-Victorian doggy paintings are presumed to embody still seems to present a problem for many art historians, despite contemporaries' professed ability to discern work of genuine feeling and the exhibition of such work alongside that of artists deemed more progressive. My point is not to equate the different artistic projects represented in numerous fin-de-siècle shows. Rather, building on accounts of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century animal representations' connections to evolutionary theory, breeding and eugenics, class issues related to the rise of bourgeois pet-keeping and animal advocacy, and the destruction of rural and Indigenous ways of life, I posit that pictures of dogs, and dogs with other species, cast unexpected light on issues of naturalism and feminism in modernity, and reveal ways in which the late Victorian and Edwardian art ecosystems intersected and engaged with reproductive economies, literally and figuratively. [End Page 117] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Robert Alexander, The Happy Mother, 1887. Oil on canvas, 81.5 × 116.3 cm, National Galleries of Scotland. Bequest of Mrs Annie Ogilvie Cooper 1925. Even scholars inclined to take dog art seriously tend to disdain late-Victorian examples of the genre. Thus Robert Rosenblum, while championing modernist dog painting, describes the Scottish painter Robert Alexander's 1887 The Happy Mother (fig. 1) as "another specimen of the nineteenth century's endless pictorial whitewashing of the harshest urban and agrarian realities under images of plain, heartfelt felicity."3 Caroline Arscott, however, warns against dismissing such works too quickly, asking us to attend to their "complex orchestration of emotional response." In her account of the exhibition of animal paintings in working-class London neighbourhoods in the 1880s and 1890s, she argues that the genre, considered suitable for the target audience due to the lessons in conduct implicit in paintings of well-bred rabbit mothers nursing bunnies, only functioned successfully when it offered "multisensory pre-Oedipal satisfactions"—haptic pleasures of soft fur evoking egalitarian fantasies of plenitude even while serving a pacifying, patriarchal agenda of moral improvement.4 Many animal artists active at the [End Page 118] turn of the century made their share of happy family paintings. But some also envisaged alternative scenarios, mobilising haptic satisfactions to different ends, or refusing to offer them at all, either when their works are less sensually painted because geared to reproduction—animal paintings were popular and regularly featured in periodicals and color Christmas numbers, as book illustrations, on cards, and as standalone prints—or because of the subject matter, in which the absence of maternal bodies is marked. Rather than focus on the purely human implications of these works, I take inspiration from recent art historical emphasis on models, materials, and intermediality to consider what they reveal about the traffic in and (re)production of animals as well as art, something the common motif of dogs encountering other species opens onto. To create her 1891 picture of puppies and chicks for the Royal Academy, for instance, Fannie Moody visited the shop of Charles Hearson & Co. at 235 Regent Street in search of models.5 In the window, she would have seen fluffy chicks, some pecking at grain on the sill, others, more recently hatched, in the glass room of a Hot-Flue Foster Mother inside the larger window display, "pushing...