Guide · Royal portraits
A short history of the royal pet portrait
Before anyone put a cape on a cat, the courts of Europe were already paying their best painters to get the dog right.
The Renaissance
The dog was in the picture before the joke was.
Around 1529 Titian painted Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, in a blue doublet with his hand resting on a small white dog that is looking up at him. Four years later he painted the Emperor Charles V standing beside a great hound. Neither picture is a joke. The dog is there because a dog says something a crown cannot: that the man is loyal, that he is loved, that he can be gentle. From the sixteenth century on, the best painters in Europe were asked to get the dog right, because the dog was part of the argument.
Velázquez went further. In Las Meninas (1656) the mastiff lying in the foreground is painted with more tenderness than the king in the mirror, and Nicolás Pertusato — a member of the court, and an adult despite his size — is nudging it with a foot. His portrait of the boy Prince Baltasar Carlos as a hunter puts two dogs at the boy’s feet, one asleep. The animals in Spanish court painting are not props. They are the only ones in the room not performing.
The animal is the only one in the room not performing. That is still why it works.
The courts
Spaniels, pugs and a king who would not put the dog down.
Van Dyck painted the five eldest children of Charles I in 1637 with a mastiff the size of the smallest prince, and the small spaniels that followed the family into exile came back with Charles II and took his name: the King Charles spaniel. Samuel Pepys complained in his diary that the king played with his dog at the council table instead of governing. He was not wrong, and the breed is still called after him.
The pug arrived in Europe with the Dutch traders and attached itself to the House of Orange; the story goes that a pug called Pompey saved William the Silent from assassins in 1572 by barking, and the breed became the family’s dog. Marie Antoinette kept one. Joséphine’s pug reportedly bit Napoleon on their wedding night. None of these animals was painted in a cape. They did not need one; they were already at court.
The eighteenth century
When the painter put his own dog in.
In 1745 William Hogarth painted himself as a portrait on an easel — and in front of it, in the real world of the picture, his pug Trump, looking straight out. It is the first great painting in which the dog is the point and the human is the afterthought, and it is funny on purpose. Thirty years later Gainsborough painted a Pomeranian and her puppy, traditionally identified as belonging to his friend the composer Carl Friedrich Abel — a full-size portrait of two small dogs, in the manner he used for duchesses — and nobody laughed, because it was too well painted.
That is the line the royal pet portrait walks. Paint the animal with the seriousness you would give a person and the picture is moving. Add one wrong thing — a fez, a wig, a crown too big for the head — and it is a greetings card.
The nineteenth century
Landseer, Victoria, and the portrait as a present.
Edwin Landseer made the pet portrait a royal institution. In 1836 he painted Dash, the young Princess Victoria’s spaniel, as a present for her; when she became queen the next year she kept commissioning him, and in 1841 he painted Eos, Prince Albert’s greyhound, standing in profile with the prince’s hat and gloves beside her — one of the most elegant portraits of a dog ever made. Landseer was knighted in 1850. By then every country house in Britain wanted its dogs painted the way the queen’s were.
Two things from Landseer survive into every royal pet portrait since. The animal is painted at its own eye level, seated or standing, with its full body in the frame. And the setting is real — a room, a step, a terrace — rather than a cloud.
Now
The cape, the cushion, and why the studio keeps it quiet.
The modern royal pet portrait — a dog in a velvet cape and a ruff, painted as a Tudor duke — became a whole industry in the 2010s, and the reason it never stops working is the same reason it worked for Titian: an animal that does not know it is being honoured is dignified in a way no person in the same costume could be. The failure mode is also the same. Pile on the crown, the sceptre and the ermine and the dignity goes.
The studio’s six royal looks keep to the Landseer end of it. The animal sits on an embroidered cushion in a velvet cape — emerald, burgundy, cobalt, dusty rose, midnight teal, antique ochre — in an imagined Marrakech salon of carved cedar, brass lanterns and, through a doorway, the Koutoubia. The cape and the pearls are real objects worn the way they would be worn. There are no crowns, no fez, no hands and no people. The face, the markings and the way they sit come from your photograph; the court is borrowed.
Choosing a look
By coat, mostly.
- Black, black-and-white, tuxedo: The Palace Guest — emerald velvet and pearls make a pale chest read like a shirt-front.
- Cream, apricot, white, curly: The Marrakech Regular — burgundy against a pale coat is the classic contrast.
- Silver, grey, blue-toned: The Majorelle Muse — cobalt velvet on a cool coat, ochre cushion to warm the face.
- Chestnut, red-and-white, older animals: The Quiet Companion — rose and sage, the softest of the six.
- Brindle, fawn, lean and upright: The Koutoubia Companion — teal and antique gold under a cedar arch.
- Tan, tan-and-white, hounds: The Medina Companion — ochre velvet and wine silk by lantern light.
All six are painted in the Salon register — the oil painting, warm reflected light, fine detail in the eyes — because that is the register the courts used. Compare it with the others on the styles page, and read the photo guide before you upload: a royal portrait is only as regal as the photograph is sharp.
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