Art, damn it, art! watch (#27 in a series)

There’s a market in everything. But did you know there was a substantial market in paintings of dogs?

“Dejeuner,” a painting that shows dogs and cats eating from a large dish, set a record for the artist, William Henry Hamilton Trood (1860-1899), when it sold for $194,500, Fausel said. That record was broken an hour later when Trood’s “Hounds in a Kennel,” showing a half-dozen dogs staring at a bird outside their cage, sold for $212,500.

There’s even a dog painting specific auction (which takes place after the Westminster Dog Show, and where the above sales took place) and a dog painting specific gallery in Manhattan. (That’s one thing I love about New York; say what you will about the city, but no matter how esoteric and specific your interest is, there’s almost certainly a store in the city catering specifically to it.)

Cutting off the punchlines…

American painter Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1884-1934) was known for his whimsical, cartoonlike images of dogs playing poker. The Doyle Auction House in New York sold one of them in 2008 for $602,500. But while Coolidge’s paintings and prints of gambling hounds have their devoted fans, they are not considered part of the canine art market, Secord said, because they are not realistic.

And in case you were wondering, Lawrence, Labradors and golden retrievers are apparently the most popular dog painting subjects today. Personally, I’m wondering how anyone gets a golden retriever to sit still long enough for a painting, but perhaps that’s just me.

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