The Dog's Gaze

Luminous … Laqueur takes us on a wonderfully illustrated tour of dogs in art, from Rembrandt’s etching The Good Samaritan to the Jeff Koons balloon dog, by way of cinema superstar Lassie. His special interest, though, is for those places where dogs are engaged in an act of looking … by the end of this clever, beautiful book, Laqueur has persuasively made his point that the dog’s function in western art is to provide an entry-point or alter ego for viewers who might otherwise feel overwhelmed or outclassed … [it is] a brilliant interpretation of their role at heart – Kathryn Hughes * Guardian *In this charming and lavishly illustrated book, Laqueur sets out how to discover what dogs do for the artists and how they do it … The Dog’s Gaze is an enjoyable romp – Chloe Ashby * The Times *[Laqueur] handles an enormous timespan with confidence and deftness of touch. The result is a book that is both erudite and entertaining – Kirsten Tambling * Literary Review *A work of immensely humane scholarship … Laqueur wants to tell us why dogs matter, demystifying his subject while respecting its mystique. [His] writing is erudite and expansive in its range of reference and knowledge, but it is addressed not just to a nonexpert audience but to a larger humane mission – Adam Gopkin * The New Yorker *As long as canines have been an integral feature of the human world, they have been an integral feature of our artistic world. In The Dog’s Gaze, historian Thomas W Laqueur seeks to answer the question of why…. Striking – Luka Ivan Jukic * Financial Times *Brilliantly wise and engaging … a thoughtful, erudite account of dogs in art, from prehistoric petroglyphs to Lucien Freud’s whippets, William Wegman’s photographs of Welmaraners and a yellow dog in a painting by Kerry James Marshall. Most of the great dogs of art history are here, but the book also contains many paintings I didn’t know. A magnificent, generous book – Robert Hanks * Apollo Magazine *A splendid blend of histories: natural, cultural, and artistic … The Dog’s Gaze is a delight for dog-loving art connoisseurs, and vice versa * Kirkus Reviews *It is difficult to think of many other books that are at once so brilliant, so wonderfully entertaining, and so moving. I savoured every page and lingered over every illustration. It turns out that a dog’s eye view gives us unique access to some of the deepest longings, needs, and creative powers of our own species. The Dog’s Gaze is full of exuberant insights about our canine friends, about art, and about the human condition – Stephen GreenblattThe Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History is a treasure trove of fascinating material. There could be no more congenial and erudite guide than Professor Laqueur through centuries of artwork from ancient times to 20th-century America and beyond. Each dog portrait is both unique and emblematic: the dog as a companion of aristocrats, and of the common man; the dog at the periphery of human activity, and the dog as a measure of morality; the dog alone, in extremis, a mirror of human loneliness. We see in these richly varied depictions of our most faithful animal companion something of the evolution of our own humanity but most profoundly we see the dog as a creature of infinite beauty, irresistible to generations of artists – Joyce Carol OatesIn this beautiful book, Laqueur shows that dogs are everywhere in our lives and our art – Sally Mann

Thomas W. Laqueur

Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. An internationally renowned cultural historian, he has published books on topics ranging from working class religion and education during the industrial revolution to the history of sexuality and the body.

He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is the recipient of the 2007 Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities Award and the 2016 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

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