The Dog and the Shadow

Landseer's The Dog and the Shadow depicts the fable from Aesop — the dog who drops his piece of meat to snap at its reflection in the water, losing both the reality and the illusion. The Aesopian fable, with its pointed moral about greed and the danger of being deceived by appearances, provided Landseer with a subject that combined his animal expertise with a moralizing narrative entirely appropriate to Victorian didactic taste. Landseer's use of animal subjects to convey moral messages was a central aspect of his appeal — his animals behaved in ways that illuminated human virtues and vices without the social specificity that would make human genre subjects class-coded.

The dog's expression of greed and surprise is rendered with remarkable anthropomorphic skill. The water reflection is handled with careful observation, and the overall composition creates a clear narrative readable at a glance.