While looking for John Singer Sargent’s entangled octopus painting at the Smithsonian’s vast Photography Study Collection, I could not help but notice this painting he made of a dog. I really, really am not a dog painting guy, but apparently I am dog painted in Paris by one of two artists. Or three. Okay four, max.
Pointy was the dog of Louise and Valerie Burckhardt, the daughters of Swiss-American friends of the Sargent family, and Pointy (1881) is one of at least three works young Sargent made as a gift for the family. [It says “to my friend Louise” on the back.]
Make that four works. Sargent’s full-length portrait of Louise Burckhardt was a hit at the Salon of 1882. Sargent inscribed it, “to my friend Mrs. Burckhardt”. If auction lot texts are to be believed, Mrs Burckhardt was trying to spark a romance between the painter and his subject. Or maybe we only know this story because someone in Sargent’s publicity department told it. He never married because he was so dedicated to his work, insisted the family members and academics gatekeeping his CR.
Anyway, auction texts. The Burckhardts kept Pointy until 1991, when they sold it at Sotheby’s, and then it sold again in 2007 at Christie’s in an auction literally titled, “The Dog Sale,” which I am absolutely not clicking on.
Seeing it in color, it’s enough to know that the Grand Central Gallery, which hosted a Sargent’s greatest hits show in 1924, did not literally paint their copyright claim on the face of the picture after all. But it also makes me think that Sargent, whose elegant, eel-like initials J.S.S. are on the bottom right, did not paint POINTY on the top, either.