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The Dog's Gaze: A Visual History
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About This Book
What do dogs do in art?Long before the phrase 'man's best friend' became common parlance, dogs were already standing beside us in art as in life. In The Dog's Gaze, the historian Thomas W. Laqueur invites us to explore why they feature more than any other animal in the ways in which we picture ourselves and our stories.Dogs have been ubiquitous in the worldmaking of visual artists as far back as the Palaeolithic age. Looking across the western tradition, from Giotto to Goya and Rubens to Rego, Laqueur shows what their presence – as hunting partners, beloved friends and even conduits to the afterlife – reveals about our own ways of seeing and how we want to be remembered. Far from being mere motifs, dogs are an integral and intentional element of the images in which they they provide narrative coherence; they look out and bear witness, often on the artist's behalf; they illuminate our understanding of morality and melancholy and some, like us, become celebrities. Indeed, as the author shows, dogs in art are our social doppelgängers, our companions in looking and being.Richly illustrated and lovingly written, The Dog's Gaze is a unique visual history that examines the shared social history of our two species and offers fresh insights into the human condition through the eyes of our canine companions.
Reviews
"A delight for dog-loving art connoisseurs, and vice versa."
"In this charming and lavishly illustrated book he sets out to discover what the dogs do for the artists and how they do it ..."
"Drawing from a staggering wealth of examples, the author successfully uncovers the overlapping uses and meanings of dogs in art, while interspersing the account with charming asides about artists' relationships with the dogs that appear in their work."
"As long as canines have been an integral feature of the human world, they have been an integral feature of our artistic world ..."
"By the end of this clever, beautiful book, Laqueur has persuasively made his point that the dog's function in western art is to provide an entry-point or alter ego for viewers who might otherwise feel overwhelmed or outclassed."
"Laqueur's book has no particular thesis to hobbyhorse for, and yet a unified-field theory of aesthetic dogginess might be distilled from its pages."
"The book starts in the deep past and goes to the present, surveying much of the science and philosophy of the human-dog relationship."
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