Artists' dogs win the rosettes: Portraits of Dogs – From Gainsborough to Hockney, at the Wallace Collection, reviewed

Walking on Hampstead Heath the December before Covid, I got caught up in a festive party of bichon frises dressed, like their owners, in Christmas jumpers. It seemed bizarre at the time but wouldn’t surprise me now. During lockdown the local dog population exploded and the smaller breeds now wear jumpers all winter.

There are no dogs in jumpers in the Wallace Collection’s new show – though, given the level of anthropomorphism, there might as well be. The ‘Allegorical Dog’ section, devoted to Edwin Landseer, includes ‘Trial by Jury’ (c.1840) with a poodle sitting as judge, and a canine interpretation of the parable of Dives and Lazarus featuring a well-fed St Bernard guarding a bone from a hungry terrier (see below). ‘None but Landseer can thus render the human in the canine expression,’ enthused the Times when this painting, ‘Doubtful Crumbs (1859), was shown at the Royal Academy. As a comment on inequality it now seems in doubtful taste – if not as tasteless as Landseer’s ‘Uncle Tom’ (1857), a canine condemnation of slavery with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hero played by a chained black pug.

Edwin Landseer’s ‘Doubtful Crumbs’, 1858-9. © Trustees of the Wallace Collection

A surfeit of Landseers may not be as fatal as a surfeit of lampreys, but it can’t be good for one’s mental health. It’s probably no coincidence that cat-fanatic Louis Wain and Landseer both went mad: anthropomorphism messes with your mind. Thirteen Landseers in a show of 59 works felt like an overdose, though Queen Victoria couldn’t get enough of them. After the Duchess of Kent commissioned him to immortalise her daughter’s King Charles spaniel Dash in 1836, a dozen royal pet portrait commissions followed.