Painting by William Barraud.
Wikipedia says that this dog is “sheepdog.”
I don’t think so. Horses do vary in size quite a bit, but cats do not. If one compares the size of that cat to the size of the black and white dog, you can see that this dog is quite large.
Working collie-type sheepdogs were never that large. Queen Victoria’s collies clearly were not.
The horse is a black hunter, a common horse for the landed gentry to ride. In 1837, collies and their kin were not popular pets for the more affluent classes. They were the dogs of the rural working class.
But Newfoundland dogs definitely were. In the early nineteenth century, anybody who was anybody had a Newfoundland dog of some sort. Some were worked as retrievers, but many were kept as “sagacious” family pets.
Finally, most of the larger Newfoundlands in Britain were black and white in color. Some of them were Irish-marked, like this dog clearly is. Irish markings are the classic border collie spotting, but they are not exclusive to herding breeds.
So this dog is a nineteenth century Newfoundland dog.
And Wikipedia is wrong.
Or the art historian who identified this dog as “sheepdog” is wrong.
But it’s wrong.
Sorry, but I can’t accept that assumption.
You’re basing your conclusion on what you know and what you want to believe, not on the what the artist knew.
If the artist was told by the farms hands it was a sheep dog then it very well could be a sheepdog, we weren’t there when he painted the picture.
The trouble is we will never know, for me it’s a painting of horse and dog inside a stable with cat lurking in the background. Some art historian might have a long winded description of this painting however, it is what it is “a painting of horse and dog inside a stable with cat lurking in the background”.
Sorry.
There is no assumption.
Reread the post. Collies did not become popular among the landed gentry until Queen Victoria bought Balmoral in 1852.
The collie was a working class dog. No one who would ever own a hunter would have been caught dead with one. In fact, if any collie-type got within a mile of that horse, it probably would have been shot because of the potential damage a herding dog could have done to it.
Small farmers didn’t own pleasure horses like this one.
Secondly, this dog is way too large to be any collie type that ever existed in the UK during the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria’s working collies were smaller in size than this dog. This dog appears to be over well over 24 inches at the shoulder.
No assumptions here. If you knew anything about the historical record of dogs in nineteenth century England, you’d see that this is a Newfoundland. Go to google images and look up old pics of Newfoundland from nineteenth century England. They very often had heads like this dog and were quite long-limbed. They were almost exclusively black and white dogs. This one just has more black on it than a typical Newfoundland.
Further, I had this discussion with a border collie expert via the chat room last night, and he said the only way it could be any kind of collie is it were some kind of Godzilla dog.
There is not a single assumption in that post. It is nothing but inferences from what is already known about the historical.
If you’re going to troll, come up with stronger sauce than that.
http://www.astraean.com/borderwars/2009/01/close-but-no-collie.html
Look at these black and white Newfoundlands, and you can see how they were mistaken for collies.
Same head and everything.
You may be right about the breed however, I am an artist and I can tell you that you can not assume that these animals were painted in correct proportion to one another. This is not a photo. It is an artist’s interpretation. As an artist, I see errors in the perspective. I don’t assume that the dog is large at all.
If the cat and horse are in proportion, why would the dog not be?
It’s also ahistorical for this to be a collie-type with this particular horse.
I agree, not a very big dog especially in our terms of today. The horse could be something like 165cm, so the dog is about 50-58cm (by eye).
[…] Please compare this dog with what I strongly feel is a Newfoundland dog in an 1837 painting by William Barraud. […]
If it is not the Waterdog, it is a large drover’s dog. You see plenty of those in the paintings of Landseer, Morland and Horlor. They were often of black & white.
But well yeah, you’re right.
I just tried.
Who would have wanted to have his Hunter to be immortalized with a kinda butcher’s dog?
In the Victorian era, many weird persons and their bizarre styles florished, that is the honey of the time, but a brute, honest cattle dog beside the black stallion would’ve been just too thick to swallow.
In terms of art history retrieverman is right, it is perfectlyacceptable to make inferences based on what he knows of the history. It would be more presumptuous of anyone to think simply because the artist couldnt master perspective that he also had difficulty with refrence points (for anyone who cant tell, the top of the wall on the left of the horse, and the top of the door on the right of the dog should have the same vanishing piont). In fact, considering that the proportions of the horse are acceptable you could presume the artist has no trouble at all with refrence points. I also am an artist.