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It's a Dog's Life: Canine Portraits & Scenes from Old Master Paintings

John Wootton, A greyhound in a landscape, with a view of Windsor Castle beyond
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As a number of works featuring dogs are offered in the Old Master Paintings December sales, we take a closer look at paintings by artists such as Rubens, Landseer and Wootton; from hunting scenes and Baroque tableaux to commissioned portraits demonstrating wealth, status and affection for the canine companions of European High Society. Click the image above to explore.

Past Auction
Old Masters Evening Sale
4 December 2019 | 7:00 PM GMT | London
Past Auction
Old Masters Day Sale
5 December 2019 | 10:30 AM GMT | London

It's a Dog's Life: Canine Portraits & Scenes from Old Master Paintings

  • Michele Pace, Portrait of a black and white greyhound belonging to the Chigi family, standing in a mountainous landscape.
    Estimate £120,000–180,000.
    These grand and elegant portraits of greyhounds (presented here and in the following lot), set in wooded, mountainous landscapes, date to the mid-1660s and once formed part of a group of works commissioned by a member of the Chigi family for their residences in and around Rome.
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  • Michele Pace, Portrait of a blue greyhound belonging to the Chigi family, standing in a coastal, mountainous landscape.
    Estimate £120,000–180,000.
    Together with the other known paintings of dogs from the series, these extraordinary canvases, which count among the largest pictures of their kind, are some of the earliest examples of sporting art and represent a significant chapter in the history of canine portraiture.
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  • Studio of Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Diana and her nymphs hunting, 1636. Estimate £300,000–500,000.
    This large canvas was part of a major royal commission given to Rubens and his studio by Philip IV of Spain (1605–1665). It formed part of a series of more than sixty works painted between the end of 1636 and early 1638 to decorate the King’s hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada, near Madrid. The preparatory sketch for this painting was acquired by the Prado in 2000. Both the finished painting and the sketch show a stag fighting off four hounds, using its antlers to constrain two of them. Rubens’ profound understanding of classical literature is manifest in the works he designed for the Torre, which draw their inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
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  • Jan Anthonisz. Van Ravesteyn, Portrait of a young golfer. Estimate £120,000–180,000.
    This portrait of a little boy, in his finest garb of silks, lace and a feathered hat, surrounded by his toys, paints a quintessential image of childhood in the upper echelons of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlandish society. The portrayal of children in Dutch art around 1600 is a phenomenon of its own that provides a link between the older tradition of representing children only in the role of the Christ Child or as children of divinely chosen royalty, and a new reflection of the infancy and childhood of the political and religious policies of the independent Dutch Republic.
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  • John Wootton, King William III stag hunting.
    Estimate £200,000–300,000.
    This large-scale hunting piece relates closely to the important series of grand cycles that Wootton painted for his most esteemed aristocratic patrons, many of which remain in the houses for which they were painted today. Rightly regarded as the finest sporting artist of his generation, nowhere is Wootton’s mastery and versatility shown to better effect than in these great hunting scenes.
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  • Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Study of a Scotch Collie (recto); Study of William Russell with a falcon and a hound (verso).
    Estimate £150,000–200,000.
    The Scotch Collie is a landrace breed originating from the highland regions of Scotland, descending originally from a combination of ancient Roman Cattle Dogs, Native Celtic breeds and Viking Herding Spitzes. In the Highlands of Landseer's day they were used extensively in rural areas for herding sheep and other farm animals, as well as guarding the homestead and hunting. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a large number of these dogs were imported to America to assist immigrant families in maintaining their new farms.
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  • Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, A Highland ghillie with two deerhounds and a terrier.
    Estimate £100,000–150,000.
    This beautiful sketch of a Highland ghillie with his dogs is probably one of a series of studies of Highlanders and Highland life that Landseer painted in the 1820s and 1830s, a period when he was spending a lot of time staying with the Duchess of Bedford in the remote valley of Glenfeshie. A keen sportsman who spent a great deal of time in the Highlands of Scotland, Landseer was deeply impressed by the character and resourcefulness of the keepers and ghillies with whom he stalked.
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  • John Wootton, A whippet in a landscape with a dead pheasant, Estimate £20,000–30,000.
    Wootton’s dog portraits are one of the high points of his art. This painting, and the following, of much-loved hounds are particularly fine examples and exemplify the artist’s subtle use of the mock-heroic form, which lends so much charm to his work in this vein. Wootton’s earliest portraits of gun dogs and hounds are essentially still-life compositions and, in their elegance, relate more closely to Flemish game and flower paintings by Hondecoeter and Peter Casteels than they do to the frenetic bestiality found in the animal paintings of Frans Snyders, Paul de Vos or Jan Fyt.
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  • John Wootton, A greyhound in a landscape, with a view of Windsor Castle beyond
    John Wootton, A greyhound in a landscape, with a view of Windsor Castle beyond.
    Estimate £30,000–50,000.
    Wootton’s dog portraits are one of the high points of his art. This painting, and the previous, of much-loved hounds are particularly fine examples and exemplify the artist’s subtle use of the mock-heroic form, which lends so much charm to his work in this vein. Wootton’s earliest portraits of gun dogs and hounds are essentially still-life compositions and, in their elegance, relate more closely to Flemish game and flower paintings by Hondecoeter and Peter Casteels than they do to the frenetic bestiality found in the animal paintings of Frans Snyders, Paul de Vos or Jan Fyt.
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