Was Van Gogh Afraid of Dogs?
Recently, while looking for photos of dogs online, I came across a video showing a one-eared rescue dog named Van Gogh. It’s a great, if also pretty obvious, choice considering what happened to the Dutch painter in the winter of 1888, about a year and a half before his untimely death by suicide in 1890. It made me curious about how Van Gogh himself might have felt about dogs. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find, but the results were stranger, and more interesting than I could have hoped.
In his lifetime, Van Gogh produced roughly two thousand works of art. Naturally the oil paintings are the most well-known, but slightly better than half of his production is made up of sketches, drawings, and watercolors. Among these, at first only one major dog-focused image turned up, "Barking Dog" a sketch held in the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterloo, Netherlands (not to be confused with the Waterloo in Belgium, where Napoleon met his defeat).
And a terrifying image it is. Dated 28 December, 1862, the simple pencil drawing shows a lean, short-haired animal, teeth bared, claws digging into the ground, muscles and tendons straining, poised to attack. Sharp lines and shading, and subtle exaggerations to the shape make for a fearsome sight, enough to make the viewer think the artist who drew the image was terrified of dogs.
Van Gogh may well have not cared for dogs, but hold on a moment. In December of 1862 Van Gogh would have been all of nine years old, and was still attending school in or near his home of Groot-Zundert. Further searches turn up a second image, a copy showing the animal’s outline and shading more pronounced, making for an even more menacing figure. Both drawings bear the same date, and are signed with what appears to be Vincent Van Gogh’s name.
It would seem that neither version of this drawing are by the famous Dutch painter. The catalog for the Kröller-Müller’s collection indicates that this is the work of an anonymous artist, done “in the style of V. Adam.” The French artist Jean-Victor Vincent Adam (1801-1866), though not as well known today, was a prolific painter and, in the latter part of his career, a lithographer, who produced drawings for the books Views in the Environs of Paris, and Studies of Animals for an Edition of Bufon. One of his frequent subjects is rural life. More specifically, he completed numerous drawings and engravings of domesticated animals, cows, chickens, draught horses, and the like. He also drew numerous scenes of hunting dogs at their work, tearing at their quarry with sharp teeth and claws. Studying what is readily available of Adam’s catalogue, it doesn’t appear that whoever created "Barking Dog" was working from a specific image. Instead, the dog, although a hunting breed similar to those seen in Adam’s work, has gone from hunter to hunted.
See the ragged line behind the dog’s hind paws, which, on closer inspection, suggests a precipice. The animal isn’t poised to attack. Instead, it’s trapped, attempting to defend itself. Perhaps the artist, whoever they were, was feeling cornered themselves. Certainly, this is a feeling Van Gogh might have well understood.
I went looking for other examples of dogs in Van Gogh’s work. Further searches did yield results, though not many. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has a total of two. The first is a simple pencil sketch on graph paper showing a dog’s head. A second drawing (mixed media), shows a woman taking her lapdog for a walk.
Both of these were completed late in the artist’s career (1890 and 1886 respectively), during a period when he would have been producing many of his most celebrated canvases. Ultimately these two works, each of them somewhat grotesque, though not as menacing as the image that set this whole search in motion, are debris cast aside in the whirlwind of the artist’s final years of production. Possibly they were drafts for something greater that Van Gogh might have created, had he lived a little longer.
And tenuous as the connection between the 1862 drawing and Van Gogh’s later work may be, it does nonetheless gesture toward the insight and depth of feeling that made him the artist he was. Though it may not have been Van Gogh’s hand (as I’d initially thought) that drew the image, one could nonetheless easily imagine a young Vincent asking for a copy of this drawing of an animal in distress, warning off others, and, at the same time, asking for help.