Bonhams Is Celebrating the Dog Days of Summer

International Dog Day is more than a month away, but Bonhams Scotland has already opened its annual The Dog Sale for online bidding. The auction, which will culminate in a live sale in Edinburgh on July 24 at 2 p.m. BST, is a celebration of man’s best friend and a must-peruse for art collectors who also identify as canophiles.

Among the lots are portraits of working dogs and pampered pooches, prints and sketches, bronzes, a smattering of silver, some contemporary photography by artist David Dawson and even a selection of walking sticks with carved dogs’ heads for crooks.

Leading The Dog Sale is William Henry Davis’ Colonel Newport Charlett’s Favourite Greyhounds at Hanley Court, Worcestershire with an estimate of £50,000-80,000 ($64,000-100,000). While not exactly a household name, Davis was the official animal painter appointed to William IV in 1837 and to Queen Victoria in 1839 and exhibited at the Royal Academy, British Institution and Society of British Artists from 1803 to 1849, though he’s most often remembered for his paintings of prize-winning cows and sheep, rendered by the artist in a (to modern eyes, at least) amusingly rectangular fashion.

Here, though, he renders Colonel James Wakeman Newport Charlett seated very casually on a worried-looking white horse going, based on its stride, at a full gallop while no fewer than eleven variously colored greyhounds sprint alongside and underfoot. The Colonel is turned in his saddle to gaze down at his beloved pack.

There are also, as one might expect, loads of aristocratically rendered spaniels flushing pheasants and beagles chasing foxes and noble setters pointing into the distance. Dogs have inspired artists since the cave painting days, but classical depictions of hunting canines are a genre all their own—one very attractive to lovers of dogs in art. (Samsung last year even added a collection of royal dog art to its Samsung Art Store, which caters to the aesthetic whims of Frame TV owners.)

But what really shine in this edition of The Dog Sale are the many, many depictions of dogs at their very doggiest.

The lot with the next highest estimate is a pair of paintings by William Henry Hamilton Trood: The leader of the pack and The cat’s out of the bag (estimate: £12,000-£18,000). Trood, a Victorian painter of dogs and other animals rumored to have let his menagerie run loose in his studio, captures here on two canvases a quartet of curious pups startled by an aggrieved cat. Better still is Charles Van den Eycken’s Bon appetite, which shows a beautifully painted Maltese seated at the dinner table—no doubt trying to communicate via sad-eyed doggie telepathy that it has never once in its entire life been fed a single morsel (estimate: £4,000-6,000).

Then there’s Arthur John Trevor Briscoe’s utterly charming drypoint etching, Flight, which deftly illustrates in just a few lines the concentrated speed of a pup in full-on zoom mode (estimate: £600-1,000).

Or Henry Hugh Armstead’s oil on panel of a sad-eyed Cavalier King Charles spaniel that dog owners will recognize as patiently waiting for its human to stop work for the day and pick up a ball or the leash (estimate: £2,000-3,000).

Best of all, most of the lots have relatively modest estimates—you might very well say that with The Dog Sale, Bonhams is throwing younger collectors a bone. The auction house hasn’t compromised on quality, however. Art lovers with dogs in their lives will find both much that’s familiar and much to covet.