Study of a Dog Lying Down

Study of a Dog Lying Down (c. 1860) at the Yale Center for British Art exemplifies the observational studies that underpinned Landseer's finished dog paintings — the careful, relaxed rendering of a dog's posture in repose that gave his finished portraits of dogs their anatomical authority. By 1860 Landseer had been studying dogs from life for nearly forty years, and works like this show the accumulated ease of that practice: the dog lying down is rendered not as a prepared compositional element but as an immediate act of looking. The Yale Center's British art collection, assembled by Paul Mellon, is one of the finest outside Britain and includes multiple Landseer works as part of its comprehensive survey of British painting.

Canvas — possibly oil sketch rather than finished work — with the direct, economical handling of a study. Landseer does not labor the surface but records the essential information of a dog's resting posture with practiced brevity: the weight of the head, the arrangement of the legs, the specific quality of the coat in repose.