There’s an obscure little painting by the great Spanish artist Francisco Goya that every artist should know. It’s not his most impressive in terms of technique or content – but it’s unforgettable for its mysterious combination of interest and simplicity.

It’s the kind of work that can only come from a moment of vision, something an artist imagines in a flash and accomplishes in a matter of minutes, but that nonetheless lasts the ages.

Called, for convenience, The Dog, this little slice of painted plaster comes from Goya’s so-called “Black Paintings,” from the later years of his life, sometime between 1819 and 1823. Discovered after his death, Goya painted the Black Paintings on the walls of his house. Some are grotesque, all are intense, haunting, and reflective of his bleak views of society and humanity in general. The artist, who was by then disillusioned, nearly deaf and suffering from illness, never intended them to be seen by the public.

The painting shows a dog gazing upward toward an overwhelming vastness, empty except for dirty, indistinct shadowy shapes (likely part of the wall) and a dark sloping area near the bottom. The latter contstiutes an unidentifiable mass which conceals the animal’s body.

The placard for The Dog painting in The Prado indicates the dog is literally drowning in distress. The look on the dog’s face suggests as much; yet the animal’s overall image somehow conveys something about the essence of dogs in general and how we relate to them.

Francisco Goya – The Dog
The enigmatic depiction has led to myriad readings. The painting is often seen as symbolic of man’s futile struggle against malevolent forces, at the same that it is, necessarily, a simple image of a dog; the dark sloping mass that envelopes the dog suggests quicksand, earth, or some other material in which the dog has become buried.

It’s imagined that, having struggled unsuccessfully to free itself, the dog can now do nothing but keep its head up and look skywards, hoping for a divine intervention that will never come. The vast swath of space which makes up the bulk of the picture intensifies the feeling of the dog’s isolation and the hopelessness of its situation.

French painter Pierre Bonnard was influenced by Goya’s dog, though without the moodiness or the dire overtones and suggestions.

Pierre Bonnard, The Red Checkered Tablecloth (or the Dog’s Dinner), 1910

Some see Goya’s dog as cautiously raising its head above the dark mass, afraid of something outside the painting’s field of view, or perhaps an image of abandonment, loneliness, and neglect. As art writer Robert Hughes says, “We do not know what it means, but its pathos moves us on a level below narrative.”

When this and the other Black Paintings were first exhibited publicly, Spanish painter Antonio Sauna thought The Dog “the world’s most beautiful picture,” and his contemporary, Rafael Cougar, referred to it as a “visual poem,” citing it as the first Symbolist painting of the Western world.

Picasso was a great admirer of the Black Paintings (though he did not single out The Dog in particular), and his contemporary Joan Miro requested to see two paintings on his final visit to the Prado: The Dog and Velasquez’s Las Meninas (arguably also a great “dog painting,”) which he held in equal regard.

Diego Velasquez Las Meninas, 1656

Manuela Mens, curator at the Prado, has said that “there is not a single contemporary painter in the world who does not pray in front of The Dog.”

Such paintings remind us that one of the most important tools of creativity is the active imagination, and that’s one we already have.

If you’d like to hone your dog-painting skills, check out the video The Fine Art of Painting Dog Portraits in which artist Johanne Mangi teaches everything you need to know to bring a painted dog to life.

Artist in the Spotlight: Larry Cannon

watercolor painting of closeup of tide coming into shore with cranes in the waterLarry Cannon, “Malibu Lagoon,” Watercolor, 16 x 20 in, 2017. Snowy egrets hunting in the lagoon. This painting was exhibited in eight Museums of Art across the U.S.

California Art Club Gold-Medal winner Larry Cannon grew up in the Midwest, and moved to San Francisco following Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Architecture. He was not a painter when he made the journey, but found that it created in him an aching need to find a way to express the beauty and spirit of California and the American West. He first tried photography, but that did not fully satisfy his needs. So, he embarked on the life-long journey of becoming a painter. He read dozens of books and looked at hundreds of paintings – settling on a mantra he continues to use to this day: Learn to Look: Look to Learn.

To read more, visit Fine Art Connoisseur here.