The Most Famous Dog Paintings in Art History
For millennia, dogs have been more than pets: they’ve been our hunting partners, guardians, and faithful companions through every chapter of human history.
From ancient cave paintings to contemporary galleries, artists have immortalized this unique bond between humans and their four-legged friends. These famous dog paintings tell remarkable stories spanning centuries of art history.
Whether it’s Bruegel’s weary hunting hounds trudging through Little Ice Age snow in 1565, Stubbs’s anatomically perfect sporting dogs for British aristocrats, or Warhol’s celebrity pet portraits in the 1970s, each artwork reveals something profound about its era. Dogs appear as status symbols in royal portraits, working companions in genre scenes, and beloved family members in intimate studies. From Kahlo’s sacred Xoloitzcuintli connecting her to pre-Hispanic traditions to Freud’s patient whippets witnessing decades of studio sessions, these famous dog artworks capture both artistic evolution and our enduring relationship with canines.
And finally, what’s the obsession with dachshunds?
👉 Love dogs and picture books? Check out my guide to the best children’s books about dogs for young readers.
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Itzcuintli Dog with Me, Frida Kahlo, 1938
In 1938 Frida Kahlo painted herself with a Xoloitzcuintli, the Mexican Hairless Dog. This ancient breed had been part of Mexican life for thousands of years and was associated with the Aztecs, Toltecs, and Maya, who believed it guided souls to the underworld and protected households.
Kahlo kept several Xolos at her home in Coyoacán and valued them as both companions and symbols of pre-Hispanic heritage. Animals appear often in her work, sometimes as faithful friends, sometimes as reflections of her own fragility.
By including a Xolo in her self-portrait, she placed herself in continuity with Mexico’s history and traditions.
👉 Can’t get enough of Kahlo’s world? Explore my piece on her kitchen, where food and art intersected in fascinating ways.
Portrait of the Marchesa Luisa Casati with a Greyhound, Giovanni Boldini, 1908
Luisa Casati was born into Milanese wealth in 1881 and spent her inheritance on becoming Europe’s most notorious attention-seeker. Her stunts were legendary: renting out Venice’s Piazza San Marco for a private party where she arrived naked under a fur coat, illuminated by a servant carrying a lantern. She collected exotic animals like accessories and dressed in increasingly theatrical costumes, transforming her palazzo into a perpetual stage set.
The whole performance feels exhausting in hindsight, but there’s something undeniably magnetic about someone so committed to their own spectacle. Giovanni Boldini captured her in 1908 with a greyhound, whose sleek lines complement her cultivated elegance perfectly. Boldini was the society portraitist of his era, skilled at flattering wealthy patrons while revealing something true beneath the surface.
Here he manages both: Casati looks every inch the aristocratic eccentric she worked so hard to become, but there’s a calculated quality to her pose that hints at the effort behind all that spontaneous wildness. The greyhound, at least, seems genuinely relaxed.
Dog Days, David Hockney, 1995
David Hockney painted forty-five pictures of his dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie in 1995, working over three months at his Hollywood Hills home following the death of his close friend Henry Geldzahler. The loss had left Hockney struggling to find subjects that felt meaningful, and he turned to what was immediately around him. “I wanted desperately to paint something loving,” he said later. “I realized I was painting my best friends.”
Hockney set up easels at different heights and angles throughout the house, painting quickly whenever the dogs settled into positions long enough for him to capture them. He worked around their schedules rather than trying to pose them, following their natural rhythms of sleeping, eating, and wandering through rooms.
Stanley was the more social of the two, rarely leaving Hockney’s side except when it rained or food appeared. Boodgie remained more aloof and independent. Hockney described them as “like little people to me,” not in a sentimental way, but in recognition that they had distinct personalities and habits he had come to know intimately.
The series was exhibited at Salts Mill in Yorkshire and later published as a book titled Dog Days. For an artist known for swimming pool paintings and grand landscapes, the project represented an unusually intimate focus during a period when grief had made him need subjects that felt genuinely present and loving in his daily life.
Portrait of Maurice, Andy Warhol, 1976
Andy Warhol painted this dachshund named Maurice in 1976 as a commission for art collector Gabrielle Keiller. The portrait was part of a steady stream of animal commissions that Warhol accepted throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, as he built a more commercial and structured studio practice. By this point, he had moved away from the countercultural energy of his 1960s work and was painting wealthy patrons, their children, their possessions, and increasingly often, their pets.
The shift reflected broader changes in Warhol’s career and American society. The radical optimism of the previous decade had given way to economic uncertainty and a more cautious cultural mood. Warhol adapted by cultivating wealthy clients who could afford his portraits, treating art-making as a business rather than a form of rebellion.
Warhol’s interest in dogs wasn’t purely professional. He lived with two dachshunds, Archie and Amos, who became fixtures in his daily routine. He photographed them constantly, brought Archie to business meetings, and apparently used the dog as a shield during uncomfortable interviews, letting Archie’s presence deflect questions he preferred not to answer.
The Maurice portrait captures this moment when Warhol had transformed from avant-garde provocateur into society portraitist, applying his signature techniques to subjects that would have seemed impossibly bourgeois a decade earlier.
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Giacomo Balla, 1912
Giacomo Balla painted this dachshund in 1912, at a moment when Europe was intoxicated with speed and mechanical progress. The dog’s legs, tail, and its owner’s feet multiply into blurred repetitions, creating the visual equivalent of motion itself. Balla was drawing on chronophotography, a new technique that captured movement by breaking it into sequential frames, which had begun influencing how artists thought about representing time.
The Futurists had declared war on traditional art in their 1909 manifesto, celebrating factories, automobiles, and the “beauty of speed.” They wanted to paint the modern world as it felt rather than as it appeared when standing still. Cities were growing rapidly, electric lights were replacing gas lamps, and new forms of transportation were collapsing distances that had once seemed insurmountable.
Instead of choosing an obviously modern subject like a racing car or locomotive, Balla applied this philosophy to something utterly ordinary: a woman walking her pet. The choice was clever. By 1912, urban dog-walking had become a daily ritual for middle-class Europeans, part of the new rhythms of city life. Balla transformed this mundane moment into a demonstration of Futurist principles, suggesting that modernity had changed even the most basic activities. The painting captures both the excitement and the slight absurdity of an art movement determined to revolutionize everything, including dachshunds.
Low Life and High Life, Edwin Landseer, 1829
Edwin Landseer painted Low Life and High Life as companion pieces in 1829, using dogs to make pointed observations about British class distinctions. Low Life shows a scruffy terrier stationed outside a butcher shop, surrounded by the tools and mess of manual labor. The dog looks alert and purposeful, embodying the working-class virtues that Victorian society claimed to admire while keeping at a safe distance.
High Life presents the flip side: an elegant deerhound lounging indoors among polished furniture and decorative objects that signal wealth and leisure. The contrast was impossible to miss when both paintings hung together at the Royal Academy’s 1831 Summer Exhibition at Somerset House.
Landseer had been exhibiting at the Royal Academy since he was thirteen, building a reputation that would eventually earn him royal commissions painting Queen Victoria’s pets.
Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565
Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted Hunters in the Snow in 1565, during what climatologists now call the Little Ice Age. Winters had grown harsher across Europe, with rivers freezing solid and snow lasting months longer than in previous centuries. The extended cold reshaped daily life, agriculture, and what artists considered worth painting.
The work was commissioned by Niclaes Jonghelinck, an Antwerp merchant who wanted a cycle depicting different seasons. Hunters in the Snow likely represents December or January, showing three hunters trudging home through deep snow with disappointing results. Just a single fox hangs from their pole. Their pack of lean dogs follows behind, looking as defeated as their masters.
Bruegel had probably never seen mountains like the ones he painted here. The Low Countries where he lived were famously flat, but he borrowed Alpine peaks from other artists’ work to create a landscape that could accommodate his vision. The steep terrain lets the composition cascade downward, from the weary hunters in the foreground to villagers skating on frozen ponds below.
Interestingly, the painting helped establish winter landscape as a legitimate subject in European art, though it took the unusual severity of sixteenth-century winters to make the genre seem worth pursuing.
👉 Fascinated by Bruegel’s snowy landscape? Learn more about winter paintings and the Little Ice Age in this blog!
Pluto and Eli, Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud spent decades in the same London studio, painting the same circle of people who were willing to endure his grueling process. Sessions stretched across months, with sitters returning again and again while Freud slowly built up paint in thick, deliberate layers. It sounds like a particular kind of purgatory, but some people kept coming back.
His two whippets, Pluto and Eli, were perhaps the most patient sitters of all. Pluto had originally belonged to his daughter Bella but ended up staying permanently with the artist. Eli joined later. Both dogs learned to navigate the studio’s rhythms, lying quietly on furniture or beside human subjects during those endless sessions.
Freud painted them without sentiment or symbolism, the way he painted everything else around him. But there’s something tender in how carefully he observed their skinny frames and the way they arranged themselves in his space. For someone who lived such a solitary working life, these quiet companions seem to have provided a wordless kind of companionship. They appear throughout his late paintings like familiar spirits, patient witnesses to all that slow, meticulous looking.
Dogs Playing Poker, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, 1894–1910
Between 1894 and 1910, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge painted sixteen canvases of dogs playing poker that started as cigar company advertisements and became fixtures in American bars and basements. Coolidge had spent years painting carnival novelties and comic backdrops where people stuck their heads through painted bodies for photographs, so anthropomorphized dogs weren’t much of a stretch.
The paintings are thoroughly ridiculous—bulldogs in bowties clutching playing cards, terriers puffing cigars, a collie apparently contemplating whether to fold or raise. They’re also undeniably kitsch, designed for immediate consumption and endless reproduction. The paintings have outlasted most serious art from the same period, though whether that says more about American taste or the staying power of a good joke is debatable.
Puppy, Jeff Koons, 1992
Jeff Koons’s Puppy (1992) greets visitors outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao like an oversized guardian. Standing twelve meters tall, the sculpture depicts a West Highland terrier entirely covered in flowering plants.
Built on a stainless-steel frame with an internal irrigation system, its surface blooms with petunias, begonias, and marigolds that are replanted twice a year, making the work a living, ever-changing presence. Koons conceived Puppy as a universal symbol of love, joy, and optimism, accessible to everyone through its familiar, comforting form.
First unveiled in Germany and later displayed in Sydney and New York, it has become one of the artist’s most beloved works and a landmark of public art. Its monumental scale and playful charm echo Koons’s other celebrated works, such as the Balloon Dogs, which transform everyday symbols of childhood and celebration into high art.
Ritratto del Guercino e della madre assieme a un cane Lagotto, Guercino, c. 1625
Guercino, born Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666), was one of the leading painters of the Italian Baroque. He earned his nickname, meaning “squinter,” from a noticeable cast in his eyes, and became renowned for his dynamic compositions, rich colors, and emotional intensity.
Around 1625, he appears in this intimate family portrait with his mother, Elena Ghisellini, and a Lagotto dog. Guercino is shown with his arm around the animal, while his mother, marked by a key at her waist, embodies her role as head of the household.
The painting is thought to be the work of Paolo Antonio Barbieri, Guercino’s younger brother, whose style was noted for careful detail and refined textures.
Unlike the grand altarpieces and commissions that made Guercino famous, this portrait feels private and affectionate, capturing both domestic pride and the quiet bond between family members and their faithful dog.
