Edmond Boiteux (late 19th c. – early 20th c.) ◊ Portrait of two dogs – spaniels

Description

If one identifies the first animal portrait in the “Young Hare” of the Albertina (Vienna), signed Dürer in 1502, we must recognize that it was our Venetian friends who really invented the specialty. Half a century later, the painting “The two dogs” by Jacopo Bassano is a landmark, then imitated by Tintoretto and Titian. Surrounded by a multitude of animals in his castle of Versailles, Louis XIV asks the painter Alexandre François Desportes to draw the portrait of all his favorite dogs, from 1702. Then from 1725 to 1740, Jean-Baptiste Oudry takes over for Louis XV. A long tradition of animal lovers, destined to immortalize the companions of life, which prefigures the enthusiasm of the XIXth century for the zoos and the emergence of a true French animal art.