A Short History of Pet Portraiture — From Royal Courts to Your Living Room

Before photography, before the printing press, before any of the technologies we take for granted when preserving a memory, there was only one way to record a likeness: you paid an artist to paint it. For centuries, that privilege belonged almost exclusively to the wealthy. And among the wealthy, it extended not just to themselves and their families — but to their animals.

The history of pet portraiture is longer, richer, and stranger than most people expect. It stretches from the dog sleeping at the feet of a Flemish nobleman in a fifteenth-century panel painting, through the dog-mad court of Queen Victoria, past Andy Warhol’s silkscreened pets, and arrives — in a form that would be entirely recognisable to its earliest practitioners — in the living rooms of people who simply love their dogs and want that love recorded in something more lasting than a phone screen.

This is that story.

Dogs in the Courts of Europe: The 16th and 17th Centuries

The earliest formal tradition of European pet portraiture emerged in the sixteenth century, bound up inextricably with questions of status, loyalty, and dynastic power. In a world where a noble family’s reputation rested on the qualities of its members — their honour, their military virtue, their faithfulness — the dog was a powerful symbolic ally. No animal carried more resonant associations of loyalty and steadfastness. To be painted alongside a fine dog was to claim those virtues for yourself.

Diego Velázquez, the greatest Spanish court painter of the seventeenth century, understood this perfectly. His portraits of the Spanish royal family — Philip IV, the Infanta Margarita, the young princes — frequently include dogs as compositional anchors and symbolic statements. In his 1656 masterpiece Las Meninas, a large dog lies in the foreground with the calm indifference of an animal that belongs. It is not incidental. It is a deliberate choice, carrying weight in the symbolic grammar of the painting.

In the Low Countries, the Flemish masters brought a different sensibility to animal subjects: an almost scientific attention to the physical reality of the animal itself. Jan van Eyck had included a small dog in The Arnolfini Portrait as early as 1434 — not as an afterthought, but as a carefully observed presence. By the seventeenth century, Flemish and Dutch painters had elevated animal portraiture into a distinct and respected genre. Hunting dogs, in particular, were painted with the kind of individual attention previously reserved for human sitters. These were not generic dogs. They had names, distinguishing marks, and specific personalities that the painters were commissioned to capture.

The 18th Century: Animal Painting Comes Into Its Own

The eighteenth century saw animal painting reach a kind of golden age, particularly in Britain and France. In England, the tradition of sporting art — celebrating the horse, the hound, and the hunt — produced painters of real ambition and skill. George Stubbs is best remembered today for Whistlejacket, his extraordinary equine portrait of 1762, but his body of work includes dogs painted with equal seriousness: retrievers, spaniels, and hounds rendered with anatomical precision and evident affection for their subjects.

In France, Jean-Baptiste Oudry served as court painter to Louis XV and produced vast, elaborate hunting scenes in which dogs were not background elements but protagonists. Oudry spent decades studying the royal pack at Compiègne, producing individual portraits of named hounds alongside the grand tableau compositions for which he is famous. His dogs are individuals. They look out of the canvas with expressions that communicate something, even across three centuries.

What is striking about this period is how seriously animal subjects were taken. Stubbs was elected to the Royal Academy. Oudry was celebrated across Europe. Painting a dog well was understood as a genuine artistic achievement, not a lesser or commercial undertaking. The tradition had prestige, and that prestige attracted real talent.

The Victorian Era: Pets Become Family

If the eighteenth century made animal painting artistically respectable, the Victorian era did something more consequential: it made pet ownership emotionally central to bourgeois life. And in doing so, it created a mass market — at least among the comfortable middle class — for images that reflected that emotional investment.

Queen Victoria was instrumental in this cultural shift, as she was in so many aspects of Victorian social life. Her devotion to her dogs was genuine, well-documented, and very public. Dash, her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, was her companion through the difficult years of her early reign and was buried with a touching epitaph written by the Queen herself. Sharp, her Collie, was another favourite. She commissioned portraits of her dogs regularly, and by doing so lent royal legitimacy to the idea that a dog was a worthy portrait subject — not because of what it symbolised about its owner’s status, but because the animal itself was beloved and its memory worth preserving.

Edwin Landseer became the most celebrated animal painter of the age, producing works of extraordinary technical accomplishment and — somewhat controversially in later critical assessments — considerable sentimentality. His dogs are painted with human emotional depth: grief, loyalty, longing, dignity. Whatever one thinks of the aesthetic choices, the cultural effect was significant. Landseer’s paintings, widely reproduced as prints and distributed across Britain, established a visual language in which dogs were depicted not as symbols or status markers but as feeling creatures with inner lives. The modern understanding of dogs as family members — as beings with personalities and relationships worthy of being mourned — has deep roots in the Victorian art world.

This was also the era that saw the mass production of painted and printed animal imagery reach ordinary households for the first time. The Victorians were enthusiastic consumers of prints, cards, and illustrated periodicals, and dogs appeared in all of them. Portraiture itself remained expensive and exclusive, but the cultural conversation about animals had shifted decisively.

The 20th Century: Photography Changes Everything

The rise of photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reshaped portrait culture entirely. For the first time, an accurate likeness could be captured instantly, cheaply, and without the months of commitment that a painted portrait required. For most families — and most pets — photography became the default.

But the tradition of commissioned animal portraiture never disappeared. It contracted and became, once again, a luxury associated with those who could afford it and those who particularly valued the aesthetic qualities that a painted or hand-rendered portrait offered over a photograph. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, breeders of show dogs, wealthy owners, and genuine animal lovers continued to commission portraits, maintaining the craft tradition even as the broader market shrank.

Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, Andy Warhol demonstrated something that would take a few more decades to fully register: that pet portraiture could be ironic and earnest at the same time, that it could be high art and popular culture simultaneously, and that there was a real appetite for it among people who weren’t aristocrats or breeders but simply loved their animals. Warhol’s commissioned pet portraits — bright, flat, silkscreened in his characteristic style — were status objects, yes, but they were also genuine expressions of affection. The boundary between the serious and the playful had become productively blurred.

The Modern Resurgence

Custom dog portraits are growing again. Not slowly and quietly, but visibly, across multiple countries simultaneously. The reasons are several, and they are worth understanding.

The most fundamental is a genuine cultural shift in how people relate to their pets. Survey after survey conducted in the last decade finds that more than ninety percent of pet owners in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe consider their pet to be a full member of the family. This is not a sentimental exaggeration or a marketing talking point. It reflects a real change in how people live with animals: the rise of indoor pets, the decline of working-dog culture outside rural areas, the extension of human lifespans that has made pets lifetime companions for many people. When a dog is genuinely a family member — present at holidays, visible in family photos, deeply known and deeply loved — it becomes natural to want a portrait of them that reflects that importance.

Home decor has shifted in parallel. The trend away from mass-produced, generic interior furnishings toward personalised, meaningful objects has been building for years. People want their homes to tell the story of their specific lives, not to look like a furniture catalogue. A custom portrait of a family dog, well made and beautifully framed, does exactly that in a way that a photograph — however good — cannot quite replicate. There is a quality to a rendered portrait that a photograph lacks: a sense that someone looked carefully, thought deliberately, and made a series of choices about how to represent this animal. That care is visible in the finished object.

The gift economy has shifted too. A generation that grew up receiving and giving generic products — candles, gift cards, hampers — has developed a marked preference for gifts that are specific, considered, and lasting. A custom portrait of someone’s dog is all three: it can only exist because someone knew the recipient well enough to know which dog to portray, it required thought and planning, and it will still be on the wall in twenty years when the dog is gone.

The Pupello Approach

The portrait themes available through Pupello — The Admiral, with its naval uniforms and brass buttons, and The Centurion, with its Roman laurel wreaths and imperial bearing — are not random aesthetic choices. They are direct heirs to the centuries-long tradition of dignified animal portraiture that began in the courts of sixteenth-century Europe.

When Velázquez placed a dog in the foreground of a royal portrait, he was asserting that the animal belonged there — that its presence elevated the composition rather than diminishing it. When Landseer painted a dog with the emotional gravity of a human subject, he was making the same claim: that this creature deserved to be looked at seriously. The Admiral and The Centurion make exactly the same argument. They take a beloved dog and place them in a context of gravity and distinction, saying — with visual humour but genuine affection — that this animal is worthy of a portrait tradition that stretches back five centuries.

Each portrait is printed on 250gsm satin archival paper, built to last, and shipped from Malta to wherever in the world the order is headed. The medium is modern. The impulse behind it is ancient.

A Portrait Is a Declaration

At its most fundamental, a portrait is a declaration that someone mattered enough to be looked at carefully, remembered faithfully, and preserved. That is as true now as it was in any royal court. The dog at the feet of a seventeenth-century Flemish nobleman and the dog whose portrait hangs above a modern fireplace are connected across centuries by the same basic human impulse: to hold on to a face we love.

Photography has made that impulse easier to act on than it has ever been. But a portrait — something made deliberately, by hand, in a tradition that predates the camera by hundreds of years — does something a photograph cannot. It says: I didn’t just capture this. I commemorated it.

If that resonates with how you feel about your dog, you already know what to do. Visit Pupello’s portrait creator at /create and start building a portrait worthy of the tradition.