These are not “golden retrievers,” as Christie’s claims. The true golden retriever program wasn’t underway until the 1860’s.
The painter was John Hamilton Glass, and the painting appeared in the Scottish Royal Academy in 1852.
The dogs are fairly large, and the one in the one in the background looks very much like a British conformation type golden retriever.
You can tell they are retrievers because the game presented are a pheasant and duck.
Yellow retrievers existed long before the true golden retriever came about.
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And no, that terrier isn’t a Jack Russell, but you could call it that and not be entirely wrong.
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I have a query, now that Golden Retrievers are not all very golden in colour anymore, is there going to be a change in name to White Retrievers and have them as a separate breed or variety?
In the US, there is a huge debate about this, because our traditional lines are all derived from working gundogs that were brought over in the 1920’s through the 1930’s. Very pale dogs were never in favor here until very recently, and there are some unscrupulous people imported mass-produced “white” golden retrievers from mills in Eastern Europe, making claims that they don’t get cancer. Here and in Canada, you can still find very dark ones, but in the rest of the world, they are pretty uncommon. In fact, a lot people don’t know about about the darker gundog type, and there is an assumption they are setter crosses.
The designation of “Golden Retriever” wasn’t in common usage until around 1911, when the Kennel Club officially recognized the variety as “Retrievers (Yellow or Golden)” and then later as “Retrievers (Golden)”.
Retrievers of the yellow coat coloring were certainly known to occur well before establishment of them as a variety; they just weren’t fashionable, and often culled from litters . Nous was a yellow born to black parents (wavy-coated retrievers) and the beginning of Dudley Marjoribanks’ (later Lord Tweedmouth) breeding program that became a foundation of the breed we know today.
The dog looks like it has very light pigment compared to the one in the background – yellow eyes, pink eyerims, brownish-pink nose. This seems to be pretty common in modern Labs. I’ve seen some Goldens with pale noses, but not yellow eyes.
Very interesting; I volunteer for my local SPCA and have seen dogs that come in looking very much like this dog.