Pets in Art

Perhaps the most famous living English artist, David Hockney is also a lover of dogs.  Best known for his portraiture, photo collages and paintings of California swimming pools, Hockney also created a series of works in the early 1990s about his dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie, chronicled in the book “Dog Days.”

This winter the WAH Center (Williamsburg Art & Historical Center) presented an exhibition of sculpture created by Taiwanese artist Poren Huang.  “The Dog’s Notes” (2005), a series of gold, silver and black cast metal work, celebrates the uniqueness of the canine as a human companion and as a reflection of human behavior… from THE WAH “Huang’s goal…

“Las Meninas”, Diego Velázquez’s 1656 masterwork depicts eleven figures from the Spanish court of King Philip IV and one Mastín Español (Spanish Mastiff), a dog originally bred in Spain to keep livestock safe from predators.  Perhaps the most scrutinized painting in all of Western art, “Las Meninas” was inspiration to a series of 58 others that Pablo Picasso…

British painter Lucian Michael Freud (1922-2011), grandson of Sigmund, was seemingly very inspired by dogs.  Most particularly by his whippet, Pluto, whose life he recorded in his work…

His iconic paintings certainly more famous than his name, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844-1934) was an American artist — sometimes known as “Kash” — commissioned to paint multiple versions of “Dogs Playing Poker” for cigar manufacturers Brown & Begelow in the early 1900s…

Dogs were a theme Keith Haring revisited over and over in his work and are perhaps one of his most recognizable icons…

Dogs and puppies sculpted in steel and flowers by Jeff Koons…

“Los Caprichos” (1799) by Spanish master Francisco Goya, is a volume of eighty prints, featuring masterwork “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (top), now housed in the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain…