At the Kennel Club: the world’s largest collection of doggy art

From the December 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Before the Industrial Revolution and the great shift of population from countryside to city, most dogs were kept to do a job: herding, guarding, hunting, racing, ratting. Of course, many dogs were also, some exclusively, beloved pets. But on or about the first half of the 19th century, canine character changed, the importance of dogs as companions began to outweigh their role as employees or co-workers. Virginia Woolf alluded to the change in Flush (1933), her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, in which Flush’s descent from a line of working spaniels and his early life in the countryside are contrasted with a new housebound existence as the pet of a valetudinarian Victorian poetess. One symptom of the change in dogs’ status was the rise of dog shows and field trials. In 1873, Mr Sewallis Shirley MP – ‘best known for his development of the flat-coated retriever’, says the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography – founded the Kennel Club to bring consistency to competition rules and promote the welfare of the competing dogs. Since then, the club has become the owner and promoter of Crufts, the world’s largest dog show, and the final authority on breed characteristics and pedigree. In its 150th year the club still thrives, since 2016 – as a result of shrewdness and luck in the property market – at purpose- built premises on Clarges Street in Mayfair, a slightly incongruous presence in the land of hedge-funds and galleries. (The administrative offices are on an industrial estate in Aylesbury, to balance things out.)

Here, the Kennel Club has its own gallery, the core of what it confidently claims is the largest assemblage of doggy art in the world (its junior cousin the American Kennel Club, est. 1884, may own more art, but not all in one place). The art spills out all over the building – crowding the walls up the stairwells, along the corridors, in the public rooms; the gallery itself is tucked away in the basement, next to the library, which likewise claims to be the most comprehensive collection of dog-related literature: among the library’s treasures is a copy of the first book about dogs published in England, De canibus Britannicis libellus (1570), by Dr John Caius, half of Gonville and Caius and physician to Elizabeth I – written in Latin, but the library has photocopies of Abraham Fleming’s translation, Of Englishe Dogges (1576). It’s notable that Caius doesn’t mention breeds, dividing dogs up by what they did: terriers will tear a fox with their teeth ‘in the bosome of the earth’, harriers hunt by scent, mastiffs guard against thieves, robbers and spoilers. There’s also the ‘gasehound’, what we’d now call a sighthound – greyhounds, whippets and the like: ‘These Dogges are much and usually occupyed in the Northern partes of England more then in the Southern parts,’ Caius says – the image of the northerner with a whippet goes back a long way. The library also holds a pamphlet of 1643 about Boy, the white poodle that belonged to Charles I’s nephew Prince Rupert, which accuses the animal of witchcraft, alleging that among other things he was weapon-proof and could walk invisible and curdle custard. Sure, your modern labradoodle may not shed hair, but have we really advanced?

An Early Canine Meeting (1855), R. Marshall. Photo: courtesy of The Royal Kennel Club