I’m hoping to write about a range of different media types in this newsletter, but I admit I’ve never tried to write about visual arts before. Last month, I went to see the Wallace Collection’s exhibition Portraits of Dogs, and aside from being an extremely delightful collection of pictures of dogs, something I will always appreciate it, I found myself deeply moved by the exhibition as a whole and have actually thought about it a lot ever since.
As the website notes, the heart of exhibition is not just silly pictures of dogs, but an attempt to express the connection between humans and dogs historically— an effort at which they entirely succeed. I wasn’t at all prepared for how emotional I came to find the experience of the exhibition. The paintings on display are in a mix of styles and have a range of aims, from portraiture to satire, but the overarching narrative of the experience was, to me, the expression of devotion and love for the depicted dogs. From the fairly distancing and quaint eighteenth and early nineteenth century pieces, some comically formal and posed and some— by which I mean the examples of taxidermy dogs— frankly strange, the movement into modernity through the exhibit was also a movement into familiarity, moving through Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s own sketches of their dogs and culminating in the spectacular reveal of a room of David Hockney’s portraits of his dachshunds.
However, the excellent historical framing and careful arrangement of items means that even the strangest pieces like, um, “Ah Cum, a Pekinese Dog,” donated by his owner to the Natural History Museum for taxidermy, ceased to feel quaint or distancing and instead became deeply and movingly recognisable as expressions of love. I found myself thinking repeatedly that these artists loved their dogs so much, they just wanted complete strangers to see and understand how wonderful these animals were— and now, people a hundred, two hundred years later are experiencing that love.
Though not exactly in a narrative form, to me, this is an example of a triumph of historical storytelling. I think one of the most fascinating and difficult questions of historical narratives are understanding when to find points of (especially emotional) commonality between the past and present, and when to emphasise distance, strangeness, and change. I personally feel that contemporary stories rely too heavily on the former, often at the expense of accuracy and interest; on the other hand, the ‘Horrible Histories’ school of emphasising everything gruesome, funny, or weird about the past is flattening in its own way, and sacrifices context and clarity in favour of titillation. But ‘Portraits of Dogs’ strikes a precise and resonant balance. Portraiture itself is a somewhat distancing form: a personal painted portrait feels perhaps inevitably antiquated and extravagant to a modern viewer, an object the likes of which most of us will never have or would even contemplate trying to own. Having a portrait of your dog is just a whole other level of decadence. The exhibition’s great success is in balancing sameness and difference across time, allowing for but not smirking at the (now) strangeness of the expressions of what is ultimately a deeply familiar and perhaps even transhistorical sentiment: our love for our dogs.
Love this, please write more about visual arts again if the spirit ever moves you! Also I think there's a mistake in the link to the exhibition page at the beginning