Part 19

For the artist pets have a peculiar value. Not only are they companions and live playthings--they are also “properties.” Portrait and landscape painters use them as accessories; animal painters and sculptors find in them their models. They live in close companionship with their human friends, and the tie between them is usually warm and lasting. An exception might be the cat whose fur was sacrificed to the early genius of Benjamin West. In default of brushes, the lad used first the long hairs from her tail, then the shorter ones from her body--until she was half-shorn. True, one of his biographers assures us that he laid hold of her “with all due caution, and attention to her feelings”; but this is clearly a post-mortem statement--he had never interviewed Pussy!

Fox, a beautiful Pomeranian dog belonging to Gainsborough, occasionally served as model; but his most important office was to act as peacemaker between the artist and his wife. Sometimes, “as through the land at eve they went,” they would fall out; and then the dignified restraint between them would be first broken by one or the other writing some words of reconciliation, and giving the note to Fox. Off he would bound with it to the other party, and a messenger so charming always proved irresistible.

(From the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds.)]

Sir Joshua Reynolds’ many dogs, to all of whom he was much attached, can be traced in regular order through his portraits, especially those of children. The Italian greyhound, the Scotch terrier, the silky-haired spaniel or setter, are as well-known as his own features. A specially attractive picture represents little Miss Cholmondely carrying her dog over a brook. The pretty anxiety of the child and the unconcern of her pet are amusingly contrasted. Hardly less charming are the portraits of Miss Bowles with a spaniel, and an unknown Felina hugging a kitten.

Of a favorite macaw which often appeared in his pictures, a story is told almost as wonderful, Sir Joshua thought, as that of the painted grapes which deceived the birds. For this bird instantly recognized the portrait of a servant whom he hated, and tried to bite the pictured face. Dr. Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith came several times to see this performance, and Reynolds declared that, in his opinion, “birds and beasts were as good judges of pictures as men are.”

(From the painting by Angelica Kauffmann.)]

There remains to us an affecting last glimpse of this famous painter after he had lost his sight and could no longer pursue the art he loved. In this premature night he found much comfort with a tame bird, until one morning the window was left open, and it flew away. His grief, though deep, was happily of short duration. Death came to his relief, and he escaped from the body, even as the bird from the house.

One of his favorite pupils, Angelica Kauffmann, painted a charming picture called “Friends now, Pussy.” It depicts a radiant little girl holding in her arms a kitten whose contented purr we cannot fail to hear, so perfectly is it suggested.

Hogarth was the painter of human life as it is; of people good, bad and indifferent--noble or base. But wherever man is, there also is the dog; and so throughout this artist’s work we find him--now a drawing-room pet, and now a vagabond; now man’s companion and now his victim. Hogarth’s own dog, Trump, surveys us rather sourly from the same canvas with his master. Very likely it was the curly tip of his tail that suggested the famous sketch in three lines of a sergeant with his pike going into a house, and his dog following him. Hogarth executed the picture thus:

To be understood, however, it is certainly best to place design and explanation side by side.

Mrs. Hogarth also had a dog, which eventually was buried at the end of a filbert walk in her yard at Chiswick. A stone marked the grave, and Hogarth himself cut the epitaph:

“Life to the last enjoyed, here Pompey lies.”

I tried not long ago, though without success, to find some trace of this grave. In the oldest, quaintest part of Chiswick stands Hogarth’s house, still bearing his name, and probably, as to stone and mortar, much the same as when he lived there. But the once beautiful garden is now in part a vegetable plot, and in part an untidy barnyard. A venerable mulberry-tree and some gnarled old yews are still standing--“sole relics of a finer past”; but of the filbert walk there remains only a row of little stumps with here and there a straggling branch. No trace of Pompey anywhere, unless in tradition; “she had heard,” said the mistress of the house, “that a dog had been buried somewhere there.” And--final touch--two pigs looked out from the doorway, squealing shrilly as we passed! It seemed a pity that Hogarth should not see them; no one would have sooner appreciated the humor of the scene. But--life to the last enjoyed--he lies in Chiswick churchyard.

Famous among Middle Age painters was Paolo Uccello--Paul of the Birds--who won this sobriquet by his extreme delight in birds. They were his ruling passion, and appeared in his pictures both in and out of season.

(Drawn by himself.)]

More famous was the eccentric Bazzi, who, according to the pleasant old gossip, Vasari, “was fond of keeping in his house all sorts of strange animals--badgers, squirrels, cat-a-mountains, dwarf monkeys, horses, racers, little Elba ponies, jackdaws, bantams, doves of India, and other creatures of this kind, so many as he could lay his hands on.” Over and above, he had a raven which had learned to talk and to imitate its master’s voice, especially in answering a knock at the door. “His house was like nothing more than a Noah’s ark,” adds Vasari.

Of Vittore Carpaccio’s likes and dislikes little is known, but Ruskin praises as one of the finest paintings in the world, a Venetian interior by him, representing two fair dames surrounded by animals. Two dogs--one small, one large--a peacock, doves, a turtle and a lizard--such were the pets these ladies kept to amuse their leisure hours.

Albrecht Dürer found special pleasure in studying hares. One hardly knows which is quainter, the thirteen-year-old artist as drawn by himself, or the hare which his childish fingers sketched. A later study is the charming Bunny, apparently pausing after a pleasant nibble to look at his artist vis-à-vis. In some of his pictures, Dürer painted angel children playing with little hares--surely a gentle companionship!

But a still greater name in art is that of Raphael, to whom we owe not only Madonnas and saints, but some wonderfully delicate and realistic designs of animals and birds. Not much is said in his biographies to show that he was fond of animals, but that he studied them closely is evident. It is infinitely sad to pass now through his Loggia at the Vatican, once glowing with the master’s touch, now faded and in part defaced. Still, worn as they are, they express Raphael. In the Stanze, and his other great paintings, we know that his brush worked seriously in accordance with a plan already conceived. But in the Loggia, with the bright Italian sun shining in upon him as he worked, he laid aside all serious intent, and gave himself up to merry play. Under his facile fingers, the arched ceilings became covered with vines in luxuriant tangled growth, with interspaces of blue sky, and clusters of grapes which droop apparently with their own luscious weight, and tempt the birds on every side.

(From the painting by Vittore Carpaccio, in the Correo Gallery, Venice.)]

(From Raphael’s frescoes in the Loggia of the Vatican.)]

In one compartment, the vines cluster so close as to admit but small glimpses of the sky. On the lowest bar but one of the trellis, sits a fine fierce hawk, so absorbed in his own reflections that he does not notice a monkey reaching up from below to pull his tail feathers. A parrot on the bar above is less indifferent, and looks on with mischievous amusement. Little birds flit about in the higher branches, and a squirrel is making his way to one of the finest grape-clusters.

The number of creatures that Raphael carefully studied and depicted, is wonderful. Lizard, mouse and squirrel; tiny snake and bee and snail; goldfish swimming in glass vases half-wreathed with swaying water plants; love-birds cuddling together; long-tailed rats scampering along the scroll-work; pretty voracious ducks with bulging crops; a motherly hen hovering her chicks--all these and more, may still be seen, the work of one masterly hand. Really, the painted scenes appear alive; and I do not know who can look at them without loving the artist who so well understood the happy natural life of plant and bird and beast.

(From Raphael’s frescoes in the Loggia of the Vatican.)]

As Paolo Uccello loved birds, so Gottfried Mind loved cats and became their special artist. He was born near the middle of the last century, in the town of Berne. There he lived, and there, in 1814, he died. Of poor and mean appearance, crabbed to all human kind, he was keenly alive to the ways and feelings, the tricks and graces of cat-kind. Bears, too, he liked, and for a while frequented the bear pit of Berne to study them. But cats were his first and abiding love, and to them he returned. Whatever their moods, whether sulky, grave or gay; in repose or in action, at every age--he reproduced them upon paper; and with such marvelous fidelity that he seems to have given Pussy a tenth and immortal life. His favorite cat used to sit for hours together upon his knee or shoulder, while he--if such were her pleasure--would remain motionless, so as not to disturb her rest.

(From Raphael’s frescoes in the Loggia of the Vatican.)]

In our own time, two artists, more than all others, have been famous for their delineation of animal life; and both of these artists, one is glad to know, were genuinely fond of the creatures they painted. These two are, of course, Sir Edwin Landseer and Mlle. Rosa Bonheur.

(From Raphael’s frescoes in the Loggia of the Vatican.)]