Introducing Portrait of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney

Charming online lecture from the Wallace Collection looking at their current exhibition on portraits of dogs.

Xavier Bray, Head of the Wallace Collection and Alexander Collins, decorative arts specialist, co-curators of the show talked us through some of the key works in it  and used them to explain the thinking behind the display.

I have since been to the exhibition so I’ll save my main critique until I write that up but the talk was a really useful introduction to the show without giving away all the highlights. It was good to hear some analysis which I might have missed in the commentaries within the show, such as how many of the aristocrats lapdogs ended up living on the streets after the French Revolution and parallels in the work of Dickens and Landseer who were friends.

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