Always faithful, without question
Rory Knight Bruce explores the relationship between artists, poets, writers and their beloved canine companions
Famous artists and their dogs, described by Rory Knight Bruce
It was the American playwright Eugene O’neill who once wrote that “no dog knows the day that it will die”. For dog owners, the words of this Nobel Laureate will be every bit as comforting as any of his lines from The Iceman
Cometh or Long Day’s Journey Into
Night. Like any writer whose life involved solitude yet a craving for uncritical company, he took his comfort in canine companions, the last of whom, Blemie, a 13-year-old dalmatian, lived out his life at O’neill’s mansion in California on a four-poster bed with his own linen and bathroom, and food shipped in from New York.
“Unlike humans, dogs don’t waste their lives hoarding material things and obsessing over their ownership… rather than fearing death in the mode of humans, dogs accept it as part of life,” O’neill wrote in 1940. “He’s the only one of our children who never disappointed us,” he said of Silverdene Emblem (Blemie) O’neill, then wrote the dog’s last will and testament in his own voice: “I would like to think of heaven as with logs forever burning, blinking into the flames, nodding and dreaming, remembering the brave old days on earth, and the love of my Master and Mistress.” A small tablet on the ranch marks his life: ‘Sleep in Peace Faithful Friend’.
Fellow American and Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck was, from his early student days as a woodchuck on Lake Tahoe, another lifelong
dog lover, although he was slightly less romantic or emotional about their not infrequent fatalities. Then, in the autumn of 1960, to escape the heat of New York, he went on a road trip with his dog, which became Travels with Charley: In Search of
America. For 75 days they criss-crossed the country in a camper van: like a Bruce Springsteen record, they looked for the nation’s soul – and didn’t find it. Charley, whose real name was Charles le Chien, was a Paris-born, ‘blue’ standard poodle, who died, aged 11, at the journey’s end and is buried on the Steinbeck estate in Monterey, California.
Paris was also home to two great canine muses: Colette’s French pug, Toby-chien, and Wagner’s 10-stone, six-foot-long Newfoundland, Robber. Although Wagner was later buried with another Newfoundland, Russ, at his feet (and there are statues to the dog all over public parks and benches in Bayreuth), it was with his wife and Robber that he first came to Paris, having fled Russia in debt with no passports. As told in Fiona Stafford’s 2020 BBC Radio 3 series, Composers and their Dogs, it was Robber who earned more money than Wagner by retrieving sticks from the Seine in a version of canine busking. Robber was eventually stolen, while Russ, who lived at the Wagner house on the shores of Lake Lucerne, was occasionally tickled by his master’s whip, which is on display in the Wagner museum at Tribschen today.
For the French writer Colette, whose masterworks include Gigi and The Ripening Seed, her French bulldog Toby-chien was the first and most important of many canine companions. When she was divorcing her first husband, Henri GauthierVillars, he became the subject of a custody battle. Eventually, sharing him, Colette even took him on holiday with her exhusband and his new mistress. Toby-chien was immortalised in Dialogues de bêtes as having “a face like a frog’s that had been
“All the virtues of Man without
his vices”
sat upon”. In 1901, Colette, having conquered the stage and literary salons of Paris, declared: “I have only one dream: to live in the country and there, in the solitude of the mountains, to surround myself with as many pets as possible.”
For most writers, artists or composers, however, one canine companion is enough. When we think of the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope, it is as a satirical classicist at court. Yet, aged only 16, he was ranging through the woods of Windsor Forest with his spaniel, of whom he wrote: “When milder autumn summer’s heat succeeds / And in the new-shorn field the partridge feeds, / Before his lord the ready spaniel bounds, / Panting with hope, he tries the furrow’d grounds.”
Later, he gave one of his beloved great dane Bounce’s puppies to Frederick, Prince of Wales, with an engraved collar that read: ‘I am his Highness’s dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?’
BYRON AND BOATSWAIN
But perhaps the most famous poetic relationship is to be found with Lord Byron and his Newfoundland, Boatswain (pronounced Boat’s-wain, not Bo’sun), who came to him in 1801 and whose statue may be found at Newstead Abbey, the Byron stately home in Nottinghamshire. On Boatswain’s death in 1808, Lord Byron had inscribed on his tomb that he had ‘All the virtues of Man without his vices’. This famous line often obscures the reader from going to the epitaph’s very end and Byron’s plangent refrain: ‘To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise, I never knew but one – and here he lies.’
There is a further twist in the tale. When Byron was in Missolonghi, fighting for Greek independence, he was joined by another Newfoundland called Lyon (pronounced Lion). “He was half wolf by the ‘she’ side but doted on me and never left my side,” Byron wrote to the Irish writer Thomas Moore in 1815. Addressing the dog himself, he wrote: “Lyon, you are no rogue, thou art more faithful than men and I trust thee more.” Lyon accompanied Byron’s coffin back to London in 1824. Sir Walter Scott said of Byron: “The companionship of a dog to him seemed almost as necessary as a hat or a stick. A man was not complete without a dog and the dog was scarcely complete without the man.”
What, then, is the psychology of this human and canine partnership? “Artists, writers and musicians inevitably spend a lot of time alone, listening to what’s going on in their own heads, catching inspiration from wherever it comes from, thinking through ideas, wrestling with artistic problems,” says Fiona Stafford, who is fellow and professor of English language and literature at Somerville College, Oxford. “To have a constant companion who doesn’t interrupt with distracting questions or comments, but remains devoted, uncritical or simply there is a great comfort.”
Painter David Hockney, who, having been a lifelong dachshund owner, is now living in rural France with his Jack Russell, Ruby, recently explained it like this: “We have lost touch with nature, rather foolishly as we are a part of it, not outside it. What have we learned? I am 83 years old, I will die. The cause of death is birth. The only real things in life are food and love in that order, just like our little dog Ruby.”
Another artist much enamoured with his dogs was Lucian Freud, who had whippets. In the early 1990s, in the louche The Globe dining bar in Notting Hill, I was at the communal table when Freud came in with a whippet and sat opposite me. He did not speak and I would not have presumed to strike up a conversation. It gave me an opportunity, however, to observe the whippet, whose eyes never left his master and the dog never moved from the bench beside him until Freud got up to leave. It followed him out, not on a lead.
It might seem odd to think of both Hockney, with his earlier urban life in California, and Freud, with his nocturnal painting routine, as dog lovers. But they were, because at heart both (like Scottish artist Craigie Aitchison, who was brought up on a Fife estate, with his bedlingtons)
were countrymen. Hockney grew up in Yorkshire (his painting of Garrowby Hill in Middleton hunting country speaks volumes for this) and Freud lived at Dartington in Devon, at Colchester during his art-college days and on the Welsh borders in a cottage without electricity.
Another good example of a dog lover’s country upbringing is Robert Burns, the Alloway tenant farmer’s son. His poem
The Twa Dogs is a canine conversation between his own Border collie, Luath, and a well-bred Newfoundland, Caesar. It is a poignant homage to Luath, who was killed by a stranger the night before Burns’s own father’s death. Its message is that wealth does not necessarily bring happiness.
This is not to say that well-known dogs and their owners have not lived in cities. Perhaps the most famous Scottish dog, through whom his owner became known via books and films, is Greyfriars Bobby. Bobby was the Skye terrier of town nightwatchman John Gray who, on his owner’s death, was said to have slept by his grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard, in Edinburgh’s Old Town, for the following 14 years. Outside the churchyard, where Bobby himself is buried, is a pub bearing his name and a small statue and water fountain, where it is customary for passers-by to rub his polished nose.
One dog whose life was beyond compare is Thomas Hardy’s rather large, rough-haired fox terrier, Wessex, who lived with his master at Max Gate in Dorset. He was not always popular with visitors.
“All of his kind are fighters,” Hardy’s second wife, Florence, wrote to one who had been bitten. But, according to Claire Tomalin’s biography of Hardy, “They doted on him together, ignoring the fear he inspired in postmen, maids and visitors alike, as well as repeated demands from local people that he should be put down.” He was fed from their own plates at table, had an eiderdown on the floor and they kissed him goodnight at bedtime.
Tomalin says: “They indulged him in every way, like a delicate, delinquent child, and he behaved accordingly.”
HARDY'S WESSEX
Hardy wrote two poems about Wessex, who was 14 years old when he died in December 1926. He is buried at Max Gate under a Portland Stone memorial that reads: ‘The Famous dog Wessex: Faithful, Unflinching.’ In the poem A Popular Personage at
Home, Hardy wrote: “I live here, ‘Wessex’ is my name: / I am a dog known rather
“It turns out music royalty
is no less appreciative
of dogs”
well; / I guard the house; but how that came / To be my whim I cannot tell.”
Wessex was related to Edward VII’S terrier, Caesar, who, at his master’s state funeral in 1910, took precedence behind the royal cortège over nine kings. But it turns out music royalty is no less appreciative of dogs than the crowned kind. When Sir Elton John entered into a civil partnership with David Furnish at the Windsor Guildhall in December 2005, they got a special licence permitting Arthur, Sir Elton’s black-and-white cocker spaniel, to be best man. Inspired by Arthur, who died in 2018, Sir Elton wrote the song Just Like
Noah’s Ark. To the eagle-eared, Arthur can be heard barking alongside ‘woof bells’ at the end of the song. After years in the music business, Sir Elton would perhaps agree with Alexander Pope that “histories are more full of the examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends”.