We’ve Always Put Pet Art on the Wall (We Just Forgot to Keep Doing It)
Let’s face it, if you’ve got a phone full of your dog and a heart that does a little flip every time you scroll past one of those images, you are not a new kind of person. Long before dog photography was a thing you could search for, people were doing this exact thing. You’re part of one of the oldest traditions in human history.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole recently, looking at how far back this instinct really goes. Turns out, all the way.
Ancient Egypt: pets as sacred, not incidental
Egyptian tomb paintings from thousands of years ago regularly included dogs and cats alongside the people who loved them. Not as background detail, but as meaningful figures in their own right. Animals were tied up in ideas of protection and the afterlife and worth preserving in art so the bond would last well beyond a single lifetime.
That’s the same reason a client of mine wanted a portrait of her aging Golden. She knew their bond needed somewhere to live on, and a phone screen wasn’t going to be enough.
Ancient Greece and Rome: loyalty, worth saying out loud
Dogs showed up constantly in Greek and Roman art and pottery, prized for their faithfulness and their bravery. The Greeks even saw dogs as a kind of guide between this world and the next, which is a lot of responsibility for an animal who also just wanted a nap in the sun. Romans, meanwhile, gave dogs as gifts between people they loved, a built-in symbol of devotion, and Roman women in particular kept small lap dogs simply for the joy of their company (some things really do stay the same). A dog in a piece of art was never just decoration. It said something true about the people who owned it.
The Renaissance: your dog said something about you
Having your portrait painted was already a status symbol, and if you were wealthy enough, your dog got painted right alongside you. Nobles commissioned elaborate portraits of their horses and hounds to show off their standing, and a dog placed in a painting was never a random choice. It carried meaning: loyalty, devotion, sometimes even a quiet moral statement about the person standing next to it.
Cats had a slower path into respectability (medieval Europe had complicated feelings about cats). But by the time you reach painters like Manet, a cat in a composition was doing just as much symbolic work as a dog would have centuries earlier. Horses, meanwhile, were treated as practically noble in their own right, worthy of grand portraiture all on their own.
Queen Victoria: the original dog mom energy
Special mention here for Queen Victoria, who took the whole pet portrait thing and ran with it. Over her lifetime she owned 640 dogs across 32 breeds (her diaries kept count), and she commissioned portrait after portrait of her favorites, Pomeranians and Collies among them, from some of the era’s most celebrated artists. By the end of her reign, a proper British home simply wasn’t complete without one on the wall.
Who needs Instagram when you’ve got a portrait of your favorite Pomeranian (or Border Collie) over the mantel.
So what happened?
Somewhere between Queen Victoria and now, we didn’t stop loving our pets like family. If anything, we love them louder. But somewhere along the way, the art moved out of the living room and into a phone. We take more images of our dogs than any generation in history, and fewer of us actually see them regularly.
That’s the part I want to gently push back on. Not because there’s anything wrong with a phone full of photos (I’ve got thousands of Believe and Asher on mine too), but because for all of recorded history, celebrating a pet meant putting them somewhere you’d see them. On a wall. On a shelf. Somewhere you’d walk past every day and feel something.
That instinct never left us. We just got out of the habit of acting on it.
This isn’t new, it’s just due for a comeback!
Every time I sit with a client during an ordering appointment and watch them see their images for the first time, I think about this exact history. The tears, the “oh my gosh, look at her,” the moment they realize this dog deserves more than a place in their camera roll. That reaction isn’t new. Egyptians felt it. Renaissance nobles felt it. Queen Victoria very clearly felt it.
Your dog isn’t “just” a dog. People have known that for thousands of years, and they proved it the same way, over and over: they made art of the bond and hung it somewhere they’d see it.
If you’ve got a dog who deserves a spot on your wall, and I have a feeling you do, that’s exactly what I’m here for. You can find my inquiry form at DonnaKelliher.com, and we’ll figure out together what that might look like for you and your pup.
Donna Kelliher Photography | Pet Photography for the best loved dogs of Greater Boston, the North Shore, and beyond
Because YOUR dog, isn’t “just” a dog.
