About Me

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Washington, United States
loves: you win if you guessed "pets" and "museums". Also books, art history, travel, British punk, Korean kimchi, bindis, martinis, and other things TBD. I will always make it very clear if a post is sponsored in any way. Drop me a line at thepetmuseum AT gmail.com !

Saturday, November 24, 2012

i bet you saw this on thanksgiving

thanks wikimedia commons{{PD:US}}
Yep.  You have to keep the yummy stuff out of muzzle reach - true now and true in 1878, when the German Realist Wilhelm Trubner (1851-1917) painted this "Dogge mit Wurstschussel ( = Dog with sausage craving)," apparently also nicknamed "Caesar at the Rubicon."
Trubner believed that "beauty must lie in the painting itself, not in the subject," in the colors, handling, proportions - an abstract principle, seen here in about as concrete a subject as it gets.  I mean, what's more real than a begging dog?  Take a look at that great fur, though.  It's built out of blocks of rich variants of brown, but what do you see?  Velvety dog fur.  Oh, give that good boy a piece of sausage, already.

1 comment:

parlance said...

Fantastic painting. He has captured the 'look'.