The Dog: 5000 Years of the Dog in Art, by Tamsin Pickeral
Dogs: History, Myth, Art, by Catherine Johns
The Horse: A Celebration of Horses in Art, by Rachel and Simon Barnes
These three books are concerned with the representation in art of man’s most successfully domesticated wild animals,: the dog and the horse. Dogs, as carnivores, domesticated themselves as early as 14000 BC, picking up scraps of meat left lying around by our prehistoric ancestors. Horses, as herbivores, were not attracted to such scraps. They were captured in the wild and broken in. Dogs were Jacks-of-all-trades. They were guardians of our houses (a Pompeiian mosaic from the second century AD of a fierce dog bears the inscription ‘Beware of the Dog’); they herded our sheep and cattle; and, above all, they acted as aids in hunting for sport or meat.
This co-operative enterprise was celebrated in art from Babylon, through ancient Greece and Rome, to the present day. From the 18th century onwards, in Britain, there must be hundreds of pictures of meets and famous runs of celebrated packs of fox-hounds, the more mediocre now banished to the attics of great country houses. As late as the 1940s, Sir Alfred Munnings, a fashionable and gifted painter of horses and hounds, and himself an enthusiastic fox-hunter, was elected President of the Royal Academy of Arts.
The evident conclusion to be drawn from these three books is that the horse has declined as an object of art, and the dog has advanced, as aristocratic and monarchical societies become consumer democracies. Horses are aristocratic and expensive to keep at livery; dogs are democratic and cheap. Van Dyck, Titian and Velasquez painted kings on horseback. Our present Queen is known to the mass of her subjects as the breeder of Welsh corgis.
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