Every Dog Has Its Artist

About two months ago, footage of trembling beagles imprisoned at a biomedical research facility in Wisconsin, and of the tear-gassed activists who tried to rescue them, went viral. Photojournalists captured the dogs huddled together. They look into the cameras. They look at us — the humans who put them there. 

It feels dreadful to return the gaze, to acknowledge the intense pain one species can cause another. Yet, it is essential to do so, as Thomas W. Laqueur argues in a new book. 

The Dog's Gaze: A Visual History (2026) offers an expansive, accessible survey of canine presence in Western art from the Palaeolithic period onward. Brilliant, full-color reproductions of 250 artworks fill the book's pages as evidence of what Laqueur terms an "aesthetics of sociability." A dog, he contends, is an "animal that, because it sees with us, is uniquely gifted at breaching the bounds of species in art and perhaps also in life."

What might have been a straightforward, iconographic survey takes on a second, equally important role: It is a guidebook to understanding dogs as embedded figures in visual culture across time.

Laqueur applies his thesis to concerns of both form and content. Dogs across Vittore Carpaccio's oeuvre tend to establish structural axes of vision, as with the adorable, scruffy puppy in “St. Augustine in His Study” (1501–1505). In Edwin Landseer's tender painting “The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner” (1837) and Antonio da Correggio's depiction of a kidnapping in Greek mythology in “Ganymede Abducted by the Eagle” (1531–32), a dog serves as the sole witness to a human’s suffering. Pierre-Auguste Renoir records a sociological milestone in “Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children” (1878), with a reluctant but patient Border Collie acting as a chair for one of its human siblings: the moment when dogs became fundamental members of the familial unit, rather than mere pets.

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