A look inside the surreal world of $20,000 pet portraits
Alan Tudyk was looking for something special. The prolific actor, star of “Resident Alien” as well as the voice of manic chicken Heihei in “Moana,” wanted to commission a painting to honor three beloved rescue dogs, but his visions tended to the fantastical. One idea, a portrait of his 14-year-old “terrier/poodle/chihuahua/goddess” mix Raisin holding a box of matches in front of a burning school, was rejected by a British pet portraitist: “We were told by his assistant he doesn’t do paintings like that,” Tudyk said. So he reached out to Jennifer Gennari, a painter who has been doing animal portraits in oil for nearly a decade, and she “embraced it,” Tudyk said.
For Gennari, Tudyk cooked up an even more ambitious concept: all three dogs in a scene of epic Boschian carnage. Against an eerie background of the dogs’ favorite Vancouver, B.C., woods, Gennari posed Lola, a Maltese who had recently died at 16, atop a pile of moose carcasses (plus one dismembered human hand), blood smearing her dainty white jowls. Aunt Clara, the 12-year-old cockapoo, holds a limp boa constrictor in her jaws, and Raisin is locked down on a dead squirrel. Several coyotes are vanishing into the trees behind them, presumably fleeing in terror. “We just wanted something that showed [the dogs] victorious over our idea of their enemies,” Tudyk explained.
As pet owners spend more money on their animals – a recent Bloomberg Intelligence report estimated that the $320 billion global pet industry will expand to $500 billion by 2030 – they increasing
Gennarin, ly turn to fine-art painters like who can create a pet portrait worthy of a museum or, in Tudyk’s case, some unholy twisted hunting lodge. These paintings aren’t cheap: Tudyk’s, which measured about 26 by 32 inches, cost $7,200, plus framing costs. But for the people who love them, they’re worth every penny. Tudyk actually owns two paintings by Gennari, the other a smaller close-up memorial portrait of Lola that he takes with him between his two homes in Vancouver and Los Angeles. “It’s a way of … keeping her in our lives,” he said.
Gennari is an accidental pet portrait artist. After working as an illustrator and studying in Florence, she moved to New York and worked for Jeff Koons. In her off-hours, she painted – mostly humans – and sold her paintings in a Hamptons gallery. In 2015, she painted a hairless Sphynx cat, just for fun, and put it on
“People loved it,” she said. It sold immediately.
Now, almost 10 years into what’s become a major business, she gets around 20 commission requests a day, including from celebrities like Tudyk and art-world insiders. Her oil painting prices start at a few hundred dollars and can go up to $20,000 for a large portrait with multiple animals. She earns, she says, in the six figures.
“I’ve referred to her … as the greatest living animal portrait artist in the country,” says Nicholas Lowry, the president of Swann Auction Galleries and an “Antiques Roadshow” appraiser who owns a Gennari portrait of his Boston terrier, Tilda. Nikki Glaser, a comedian who owns a Gennari portrait of a pig and recently commissioned another of a friend’s elderly poodle mix, says, “She can just inject a personality and a soul into the animal that only the owner would really know.”