Dog Shows: Porcelain Pugs and Pre-Raphaelite Painters in Thomas Earl’s Art and Nature

ABSTRACT: An obscure animal painter named Thomas Earl launched a visual attack on the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais during the exhibition season of 1851. This attack took the form of an oil painting depicting a live dog facing a porcelain dog, set against the backdrop of Millais’s succès de scandale from the previous year, Christ in the House of His Parents , which had brought the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to new critical prominence. Using canine avatars, Earl figured his own artistic practice as manly, natural, and national, in contrast to Millais’s approach, which he satirized as effeminate, artificial, and foreign. But this attack foundered on the very territory in which it grounded itself, the slippery interstices between cultural expressions deemed high and low. A recently rediscovered lithograph, published here for the first time, allows for exploration of Earl’s composition and its relationship to key developments in the history of British art and British exhibitions. These include the evolving significance of visual tropes perceived to be Chinese during the Opium Wars, and the advent of a new form of show, the dog beauty contest, which shared questions of authenticity and discernment with art exhibitions.