6/12/2023 0 Comments The Dog by Tamsin Pickeral![]() As late as the 1940s, Sir Alfred Munnings, a fashionable and gifted painter of horses and hounds, and himself an enthusiastic fox-hunter, was elected President of the Royal Academy of Arts. From the 18th century onwards, in Britain, there must be hundreds of pictures of meets and famous runs of celebrated packs of fox-hounds, the more mediocre now banished to the attics of great country houses. This co-operative enterprise was celebrated in art from Babylon, through ancient Greece and Rome, to the present day. ![]() They were guardians of our houses (a Pompeiian mosaic from the second century AD of a fierce dog bears the inscription ‘Beware of the Dog’) they herded our sheep and cattle and, above all, they acted as aids in hunting for sport or meat. They were captured in the wild and broken in. Horses, as herbivores, were not attracted to such scraps. ![]() Dogs, as carnivores, domesticated themselves as early as 14000 BC, picking up scraps of meat left lying around by our prehistoric ancestors. ![]() These three books are concerned with the representation in art of man’s most successfully domesticated wild animals,: the dog and the horse. ![]()
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