White Dog Sleeping

If only all animals had a soft warm bed I could finally rest knowing none would die in a shelter tonight.  -Terri Davis -

Master Bedroom by Andrew Wyeth















 

White Dog

First snow-I release her into it-
I know, released, she won't come back.
This is different from letting what,
already, we count as lost go. It is nothing
like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what
losing a thing we love feels like. Oh yes:
I love her.
Released, she seems for a moment as if
some part of me that, almost,
I wouldn't mind
understanding better, is that
not love? She seems a part of me,
and then she seems entirely like what she is:
a white dog,
less white suddenly, against the snow,
who won't come back. I know that; and, knowing it,
I release her. It's as if I release her
because I know.

Written by Carl Phillips

Briton Riviere, Sympathy

Briton Riviere, Sympathy. 1877. oil on canvas. Royal Holloway Collection.

Riviere’s Sympathy was among the most well-known animal portraits of the day, as discussed by the Royal Holloway Collection: The Spectator made an important point: Riviere was the natural successor to Landseer, who had died in 1873, and that he had even surpassed Landseer in his own way, ‘for he has given feeling to his animals, and yet kept them strictly within their own nature . . . Never attempting to render in his works human expression in a dog’s face, he has nevertheless mastered the points where canine and human nature touch, and painted them with an insight and comprehension with which no other artist of whom we know can at all compare’.

LissiS, Ghost Dog. 2008. published in Worth1000.com

The painting has had a resurgence since 2007 when an artist rendered the dog as a ghost.