THE DOG'S GAZE

A splendid blend of histories: natural, cultural, and artistic.

Laqueur, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, opens his account with “a very German image,” namely of his grandfather taking his pet Doberman for a walk in Hamburg. It wouldn’t be long before Jews would not walk German streets, among the many historical tragedies Laqueur enumerates, writing, “In the face of famine, disease, ecological disasters, death, war, betrayal, and all the ills of civilization, dogs are a sort of intellectual, or in this context, visual comfort food.” “This context” is his sprawling examination of dogs in the history of art, from Neolithic cave paintings to present-day photographs and paintings. Perhaps the most famous dog in art history, he writes, turns up in Jan van Eyck’s famed Arnolfini Portrait of 1434, and indeed the dog in question, “perhaps a progenitor of today’s Brussels griffon,” is gazing out from the frame at the viewer. “Seeing together and seeing one another is the basis of our co-evolution, and joint social lives,” he writes later. In a book filled with image after image of dogs in all sorts of artistic contexts, Laqueur provides other meaningful interpretations of the dog as a religious symbol, an avatar of the good home, a hunting companion, a faithful friend—and, in one terrifying instance, as a hellhound chasing runaway enslaved people. Laqueur spins fine anecdotes, such as one concerning Pablo Picasso’s beloved dachshund, Lump, of whom the artist remarked, “He’s not a dog, he’s not a little man, he’s somebody else”; and his text is full of smart aperçus, such as speculation on why dogs figure so often in stories and images about death, for “who more than the dead need protection, attention, and guidance?” Who indeed—though happily, as so many artists across human history have recorded, we need not be dead to enjoy the company of dogs.

A delight for dog-loving art connoisseurs, and vice versa.