Dogs of the New Yorker
Since its first issue in February of 1925, the New Yorker has been a mainstay of American literary and intellectual culture. Forty-seven times a year, it publishes a broad array of genre-defining work, from fiction and poetry, to long form non-fiction, as well as reviews, satire, and cartoons. Far from the only publication of its kind, one difference that has always set the New Yorker apart is the importance the editors give to the cover art, always reproduced with minimal text, showing nothing but the magazine’s title, date of publication, and price.
The artwork varies week to week, sometimes reflecting satirically on current events, sometimes simply capturing a mood. Perennial favorites are images that evoke the languorous feeling of a midsummer afternoon, or the unexpected pleasures and trials of big city life.
Of the close to forty-six hundred covers that the New Yorker has featured thus far, there are nearly two hundred that feature dogs, the first dating back to the publication’s second year, 1926. The June 5th cover by Rea Irvin—creator of the New Yorker’s signature mascot, Eustace Tilly—shows a man and a woman and their faithful pet, all tucked under a blanket and apparently asleep, while their uniformed chauffeur drives them through a countryside more suggested than shown.
Much has changed about our world since those early days. Back then, the Vanderbilts were still comfortably summering at the Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island. One thing that hasn’t, is that the New Yorker has continued to feature dogs in its cover art with some regularity. Such covers often appear in clusters, the greatest of these being 1931, when the magazine printed a total of eight, and in the years between 2010 and 2022, during which time we’ve seen dogs included nearly fifty times. Some of these recursions appear related to the artists involved. George Booth and Mark Ulriksen both find considerable inspiration in our most loyal domestic companion, but many others are one-off pieces.
In the early decades of the New Yorker’s first century, the dog appears mostly as an accessory, gradually gaining in importance from being a small feature in the greater domestic landscape to a fully fledged member of the family. Recent representations, however, place canines in a more complex relationship between human and society, with two cover images (below) )by R. Kikuo Johnson (2017), and Tom Gauld (2019) serving as a excellent examples. Both of these covers place the dog solidly within our modern technological society. Kikuo Johnson’s image takes a dark view, envisioning a future where both pet and owner lead a marginal existence, having been replaced entirely by artificial constructs. Gauld’s more playful image imagines a robot master favoring a biological pet, while the human subject appears to prefer a mechanical one. Who, it appears to ask, will be replaced first, dog, or master?
Still other covers remind us of the deep emotional attachments that we form with our pets. George Booth’s cover “The Long Wait” (February 4, 1974), does this in remarkably straightforward fashion, by reminding us with simple lines and earth tones of a city dog’s profound physical and emotional dependence on its human companions.
The covers shown here are just a few of our favorites. If you ever find one you’d rather keep, than toss in the bin once you’ve read all the articles, you can always order a reproduction to hang in your home via the Condé-Nast store online.