The Dog!

Our book today is The Dog: 5000 Years of the Dog in Art, written by Tamsin Pickeral and sumptuously, gorgeously published by Merrell. This is far more than a decorative coffee table book - it's the single best visual book-tribute I've ever seen (and I've seen them all) to dogs, an amazing compendium of all the ways canines for six thousand years have worked their way into the visual representations humans make of their world.

There are primitive cave paintings, Egyptian tomb decorations, ancient murals from the Asian steppes, delicate depictions from the Far East, plus an exhaustive collection of more familiar styles and treatments from the last 400 years in the Western world. It's an epic journey and the ultimate treat for any dog enthusiast, as full of well-researched text as it is of beautiful pictures.

Here's a sampling:


2nd century Roman statue




Few surviving works from ancient Rome depict the dog with such tenderness. This small sculpture is exquisite, in rendition, form, and feeling. The anatomical accuracy of the work is absolute, and this, combined with the profound emotion instilled in the cool marble dogs, suggests that the original subjects might have belonged, or at least been well known, to the artist.


the dog-headed St. Christopher


Pictures that portray St. Christopher as dog-headed are seen relatively rarely in modern times; most commonly, he is depicted in a more acceptable way, as a giant of a man carrying Jesus across a swollen river. There are, however, a number of Byzantine icons that depict the saint as dog-headed, an idea deriving from one of the several ancient myths that surround him.



James Stuart, 4th Duke of Lennox and 1st Duke of Richmond, by Anthony van Dyck



Van Dyck was one of the finest painters of dogs of all time, and this magnificent greyhound is perhaps his crowning achievement in the field. There are few images that touch the soul quite like this. The dog leans into its master, James Stuart, its head pressed against the man's side, while Stuart rests his hand on the dog's brow in a gesture of infinite tenderness ... the gesture speaks volumes about the intimacy and tenderness that exist between dog and master.

Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, by Girolamo Pompeo Batoni



There is great feeling in this work, which depicts the young Charles Lennox with two fine spaniel-type dogs against a Classical background. His demonstrative pose, caressing the silky ears of the dark-brown dog with both hands, is unusual in male portraiture, the traditional gesture being one hand resting, often with a degree of detachment, on the dog's head. It is touching to see the young man, who would become one of the great parliamentary reformists, expressing such obvious sentiment towards the dog.



After the Battue, by Charles Edward Stewart


This is a particularly atmospheric painting by the relatively unknown artist Charles Edward Stewart, depicting hounds returning to the kennel after the hunt. Here the hounds, led by a perky terrier, trudge along the wet, muddy track. Stewart effectively creates an 'end of day' feeling through the hounds' expressions; with their heads mostly down, showing little anticipation, these are tired dogs that have done their job and are not interested in anything but a warm, dry kennel. The sky is heavy with moisture - it is a chilly scene, with the wind whipping the attendant's coat back, but there is also a sense of accomplishment, of a job done and the anticipation of finding comforting shelter from the elements.

Eos, by Edwin Landseer




This image of the superlative greyhound bitch Eos must rank among the greatest dog paintings in history, and it is entirely unsurprising that the clear, beautiful lines and striking composition were the work of Edwin Landseer, favourite artist of Queen Victoria. The picture was a surprise for Prince Albert, so Landseer is rumoured to have had to borrow the prince's hat and gloves without his knowledge and rapidly return them to their rightful place before they were missed. On the table lies a cane, artfully projecting over the edge, but it is perhaps the brilliant, simple background of the red cloth, combined with the restrained black and white of the other elements, that makes the work so distinctive - against this the fluid form of Eos is aesthetically unsurpassable.

to which I'll add two pictures not included in this book - the first is my favorite (for reasons some of you will probably find obvious) of all Norman Rockwell's many paintings featuring dogs:

Home on Leave



And the second is a far more ominous work from the early 20th century, a painting whose surface portrays only peace and gay frivolity - but lurking within the picture is an insidious evil rank enough to topple a monarchy. I'll leave you to spot it on your own, if you dare:



Such a dire depiction notwithstanding, it's a pleasure to kick off 2009 here at Stevereads with such a whole-hearted recommendation! The Dog is a beautiful, endlessly fascinating book every dog-person should own.

Aristocrats

Our book today is Aristocrats by Stella Tillyard, a pleasant and entirely diverting look at nearly a century in the lives of the vain, shallow, clever, artful, silly, and mostly sincere world of the Lennox family, whose distaff noble line descends from Louise de Keroualle, a snub-nosed buxom-breasted slut who never took her eyes off the prize while she was one of Charles II’s mistresses. In exchange for services rendered, the dear little oaf was made Duchess of Portsmouth, and the bastard she gave her bastard of a lover was made Duke of Richmond, Earl of March, Duke of Lennox, and a baker’s dozen other things, all to overcompensate for the bar sinister.

Tillyard follows the ups and downs of the Duchess’ darling descendants in the Lennox line, mainly the sisters Caroline, Emily, Louisa, and Sarah, from 1740 to 1832, and the resultant book, Aristocrats shouldn’t be dismissed just because it sparkles like fine champagne. It does sparkle, Tillyard has worked hard to make it the splendid, effortless read it is … but there’s a lot of research here too, and a positively dismaying amount of digging through mounds of Lennox family letters and documents. Tillyard must have known the great story she could fashion from such materials (and she might have had some accurate foresight as to how well it would sell to a perpetually glamour-starved reading public), otherwise the tedium of the spadework would have sent her running from the archives.

She stuck with it, however, and we readers are the better for it. She introduces her four central sisters amidst the splendor of the British and Scottish uppercrust in the Hanoverian age, and page after page gleams with gigantic family manors, important state functions (the sisters were related by blood or marriage to a whole slew of movers and shakers in government and royal circles), and, thanks to Tillyard’s considerable skill, memorable character-sketches. For instance, she quotes Caroline’s estimate of her own inner state of mind:

“Living alone suits my disposition best, at least passing a good deal of my time so. I love to saunter about the gardens, looking at the plants etc by myself or being shut up in my dressing room reading or writing.”

But Tillyard has read everything about Caroline and cannot be deceived by such claims – indeed, she might be said to know Caroline better than Caroline knew herself:

There was another side to this intelligent, worried, poised, and slightly pedantic young woman – an irresistible pull towards those things she professed to dislike: wit, recklessness, bustle, and ambition. … wit fascinated her, and so did excess, that quality of her grandfather’s which her father had worked so hard to suppress in himself and his family.

So thorough has been Tillyard’s research that readers may occasionally feel swamped by all the names and bloodlines, like being force-fed Burke’s Peerage with a cement-mixer. Usually Tillyard keeps this under control, but every so often there’s a deafening blast of breeding that reads more like an extract from Debbie’s Diaries than a passage from sober history:

Several of Emily’s or Sarah’s children married within the family, or within the family circle, and with these weddings came a sense of time coming round again. Lord Henry Fitzgerald married Charlotte, Baroness de Rof, the granddaughter of Henry Fox’s faithful friend Charles Hanbury Williams. Mimi Ogilvie also married into the Holland House circle. Her husband was Charles Beauclerk, son of the notorious Topham Beauclerk and his saintly wife, Lady Di. Sarah’s fifth son, Henry, married his cousin Caroline Bennett, one of the Duke of Richmond’s illegitimate daughters. William Napier married Caroline Amelia Fox, daughter of General Henry Fox, Caroline’s “little Harry.” Richard Napier married into the extended Conolly family. The most unlikely circle was completed several years after Sarah’s death when her daughter Emily married Sir Henry Bunbury, nephew and heir of her first husband, Sir Charles Bunbury.

Yeesh.

But such passages are anomalies in an otherwise nearly flawless book that dances the reader through a century of changing social tides and violent, often engrossing family feuds (the source of many of those feuds was the Duke of Richmond buried in that above paragraph, Charles Lennox, the brother of these Lennox sisters, the inheritor of mind-bogglingly vast estates and wealth who in later life ossified into a moron but who was, in his youth, the most startlingly handsome teen who ever rod-and-sceptre’d a barmaid and who, his whole life long, cherished an affection for dogs far, far deeper than that which he ever felt for any fellow human being)(a fact which successive generations of portrait-painters, as you can see, took pains to commemorate).

In any study like this one, the British aristocracy can’t help but come off as a bit of a paradox – a bunch of sniveling ninnies who nevertheless did a rather good job of running a country – and Tillyard makes no attempt in Aristocrats to resolve that paradox. But once you’ve spent the whole book under her spell, you won’t care if she does or not – you’ll be fascinated by these glittering creatures, and you’ll want to stay in their world. Fortunately, Aristocrats will always be right there on your shelf, ready to take you there.