Why There Are So Many Dogs in Great Paintings - The Atlantic

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Dogs follow the direction of a person’s gaze almost as well as another person can—better, in fact, when they are motivated to, because dogs are relentless. They track the movements of our eyeballs to see what we’re looking at so that they can look at it too, and they pester us to look just as attentively at them. When my late golden retriever had something to show me—a ball that had rolled under a fence, a man with an irregular gait—he didn’t always bark. Sometimes he stared first at the ball or man, then back at me, then at the ball or man again, until I retrieved the ball or moved away from the man. People speak with their eyes all the time, but every so often I’d be struck with wonder that a consciousness as radically different from mine could communicate so effectively. Then I’d love him even more, if such a thing were possible, and feel a little insecure. My dog was putting himself on my conversational level, as it were, or maybe the better way to say it is he was yanking me up to his level.<br>Explore the July 2026 Issue<br>Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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The first animals to be domesticated, dogs began the process about 20,000 years ago, and the more time they spent in our field of vision, the longer they could maintain eye contact. Evolutionary theory offers an explanation: Dogs that could follow the human gaze and predict human actions had more success as hunting or herding partners.<br>In a 1977 essay called “Why Look at Animals?” the art critic and novelist John Berger recounts an origin myth about the importance of seeing and being seen by creatures unlike us. To summarize a convoluted tale: A long time ago, before people had tamed animals, an animal looked at a person and the person looked at the animal, and the person saw that the animal was different and that they couldn’t understand each other. And yet the person recognized a fellow being with its own power, “comparable with human power but never coinciding with it,” and realized that to be seen by the animal was to become more fully oneself. We felt less lonely as a species. But then, Berger writes, industrial capitalism reduced animals to things—toys, future packages of meat, even “the new animal puppet: the urban pet.” We lost “a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange.”<br>Berger was right about the sense of wholeness that comes from seeing oneself in an animal’s eyes, and he was right to think that economic forces could undermine that connection, but he was wrong about pets. I wonder whether he had a dog. Or a cat. In 1997, Jacques Derrida held a seminar on the experience of seeing himself being seen by his cat as he stood naked before her. Published as a book during the aughts, the lecture became a key part of a revisionist philosophy of the human-animal interaction. Derrida undoes the solipsistic Cartesian formula for self-knowledge, “I think, therefore I am,” and substitutes a vision of the self as seen through the animal’s eyes. Derrida feels shame before the cat, he reports, but is not sure why. Perhaps he was “ashamed of being as naked as an animal,” he thinks. Soon he is asking, “Who am I, therefore?”<br>Read: Dogs in books: an illustrated history<br>Dogs must have provoked the same jittery, uncanny-valley feelings in early artists as Derrida’s cat did in him, because dogs appear more than any other domesticated animal in prehistoric and ancient art. Dog art goes back nearly 10,000 years, which is when early-Holocene people made giant paintings on rocks in Saudi Arabia showing people and dogs collaborating in a hunt. Some dogs in the pack seem to be looking up at a human. Thousands of years later, man and dog had grown so comfortable around each other that they didn’t need to trade glances. On an ancient-Greek vase from between 500 and 450 B.C.E., a man and his dog inspect an ithyphallic herm, a priapic statue with the head of the god Hermes; they both seem to express amused astonishment. The man is pulling the statue’s beard, as if testing whether it’s real. The dog has almost passed the figure but pauses and swivels his head back and up, doing a double take at the size of its organ.<br>Thomas W. Laqueur’s The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History tells the story of the watchful dog. The book starts in the deep past and goes to the present, surveying much of the science and philosophy of the human-dog relationship. But Laqueur’s chief interest lies in the Western pictorial tradition, especially from the Renaissance into the 20th century. A cultural historian, Laqueur likes to come at big and familiar topics from unexpected angles: The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015) analyzes the respectful handling of corpses in order to understand what the dead do for the living. The book before that, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003), puzzles over the taboos...