On a warm Saturday in May, Ellen and Steven Gilman stood in their Greenspring Valley yard, proudly showing off their Shetland Sheepdogs, 8-year-old Annie and 5-year-old Luke. Fresh from a bath in Kiehl's new dog shampoo, Annie reclined on the sidewalk, her black fur warming in the late-morning sun, while Luke patrolled the garden border. Like a man on safari, Robert McClintock trailed the creatures with a Nikon D200, snapping photos and trying to get their attention.

It's all in the face for McClintock, who calls himself a hybrid photographer/digital painter. The walls of his studio/shop in Fells Point are packed with images of dogs and cats, most of them looking straight into the camera. He takes photos, downloads them into his Mac, then uses a pen tool to "paint" over them in Photoshop, enhancing colors and adding shading. He then prints out an image on canvas or cotton rag paper using one of two enormous Epson pigment printers, and finally paints over it with clear acrylic, to give the finished piece some texture. The whole process takes two days. Paintings from his collection run between $12 and $1,200; commissions such as the one he's working on today cost between $1,800 and $2,000, regardless of dimension, because McClintock can resize an image for any size canvas.

McClintock grew up with dogs (although now he has just four cats at home), and some of his earliest photos were of canines. "I like things that are funny," he says. "The art part is almost secondary to the feeling." McClintock says he won't do a painting of a rare or unusual breed for his collection (although he will do one on commission), because it won't sell—one of his bestsellers these days is an image of a chocolate lab puppy. His work is successful, he says, partly because of the composition of his photographs. "I like these sort of in-your-face looks."

That signature McClintock shot is not always easy to get, even with relatively well-behaved dogs like Annie and Luke. On that day, McClintock suggested a few positions and locations, but the dogs preferred to sit together on a chair in the bedroom.

"They like to sit together," said Ellen.

"They love to sit together," said Steven.

The animals were hyper-alert to their owners' movements; when Ellen left the room to fetch some dog cookies, Luke jumped off the chair and ran to the door, ruining the shot. When one dog looked into the camera, the other would look away; when one sat down, the other would stand up.

Finally, the pups quieted enough for McClintock to snap a few good pictures (Annie lying down, Luke sitting). "Oh, wow," said Ellen. "Lukey's got such expression." The portrait that McClintock will do is a gift from Steven for her birthday, she said. The couple has rescued a number of Shelties over the years. Ellen even wrote a children's book with her daughter-in-law about Molly, their first rescue, and is shopping around for an agent.

"What I love about [McClintock's] pictures is that they truly show the personality of the dog," said Ellen, who first saw his work two years ago in a show at the Rotunda. "He really captures it."

McClintock packed the camera away and headed out to his car. Annie and Luke ran out onto the deck, poked their heads under the railing, and sat down next to each other—motionless, alert, and perfectly posed.

"Of course," McClintock said, as he started unpacking his equipment again.



According to the most recent National Pet Owners Survey, 71.1 million American households include a companion animal (44.8 million contain dogs, 38.4 million boast cats). Our affection for our domesticated friends compels us to spend upwards of $40 billion as a country on pet care, food, supplies, and services. That figure doesn't include the cost of immortalizing our animals on canvas.

Pet portraiture isn't for the shallow-pocketed: Depending on the medium and size, paintings can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to the tens of thousands. But for a number of pet lovers, a lovingly done, true-to-life portrait is an investment—a tribute to the animals that are our friends, our confidantes, our roommates, our life partners.

Painting animals isn't new—the animal form has fascinated humans since the Stone Age—and William Secord, an authority on 19th century dog painting, dates formal dog portraiture to as early as the Renaissance. Secord is the owner of an eponymous gallery in New York's Upper East Side that, he says, is the only one in the country to specialize in fine-art renderings of dogs. According to him, the real heyday of dog painting began in the middle of the 19th century, when an emerging British middle class began to devote some of its leisure time to dog shows and field trials. Proud owners often wanted their champions captured in portraits. "Up until the 18th century, 99 percent of the time the dog was adjunct to the principal subject matter of the painting—in a people portrait," he says. "[Paintings that focused on dogs] are a 19th century phenomenon."

Secord has written three books about canine portraiture, including Dog Painting, 1840–1940, a Social History of the Dog in Art. His interest in the field was sparked in the 1980s, when he was named the founding director of the Dog Museum of America, now called the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog. When the museum relocated to St. Louis, Secord stayed behind in New York City and, in 1990, opened his gallery full of dog paintings, bronzes, and works on paper. "Once I got started I couldn't stop," he says. "I have a collection of 2,500 books on dogs, starting from 1802 up to the present."

What's the appeal? "I like dogs, number one, but it's not just about liking dogs," he says. "It's a fascination with the history and development of the breeds, but also the relationship people have with their dogs."

Secord says that while dog portraits were considered mainstream in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, academic painting is no longer in vogue; modern-day dog portraitists who work in this traditional formal style are on the fringes of the art world. Secord represents three living artists, among them Baltimorean Christine Merrill, with whom he's worked for twenty years.

The interior of the Homeland house Merrill shares with her husband and three rescues—a twenty-pound Pomeranian named Rudy, a Chihuahua named Brady, and a Norwegian elkhound dubbed Misty of Homeland—is packed with paintings of dogs: meticulously rendered basset hounds, Pomeranians, and Papillion-spaniel mixes against serene landscapes, each in a heavy gilt frame affixed with a brass nameplate. Like her mother, Louise, Merrill attended the arch-traditional Schuler Art School, a mid-town academy that teaches classic oil painting techniques. Her father, Walter, who was the real estate editor of the Baltimore News American for more than thirty years, was a great dog lover, she says. "The dog thing came from my dad."

Merrill's clients include Oprah Winfrey, Bob Schieffer, and Malcom Forbes; she's painted former First Dog Millie, George and Barbara Bush's spaniel, as well as a pack of family dogs from less-famous households, a few champion show dogs, and a menagerie of other companion animals, like parrots and horses. Her commissions cost between $3,000 and $45,000, depending on the size of the canvas and the number of animals portrayed. "I love to fulfill a purpose, like tailor-making a suit or dress," she says. "I'd rather make the haute couture of pet painting."

Larger oil paintings can take months to complete, she says, and preparing for a show can take her upwards of two years. Like most animal portraitists, she doesn't attempt to get her subjects to hold a pose for a live sitting. She photographs her subjects first, then works up a sketch, then moves to paint. In the classical style, Merrill usually poses her subjects sideways, or so that they show three-quarters of their body—"You want a good view of the body," she says—and sometimes includes a significant landmark in the background. "Christine not only depicts the dog's anatomy, coat texture, and expression, but also puts them in a context of either a landscape or a person's home and captures the unique, individual expression and character of that particular dog," says Secord. "It's not a generic portrait of a dog. It's that dog."

Many of her non-celebrity clients are empty nesters or childless couples who want a true-to-life portrait to hang over their mantle—and, sometimes, over their bed. "It's the purest relationship," says Merrill of the owner-dog bond. She makes an effort to personally meet all her clients, most of which are from outside of Baltimore, and quizzes the owners about where the pet sleeps and what it eats. "[All of that] goes into a holistic portrait," she says. "What can I put into those eyes to say, ‘I am this'?"



In 2004, Gil Jawetz and his girlfriend were living in New York; he was working at a new media company, while she was working as a freelance writer. Inspired by her research into Norman Rockwell, he took a figure oil painting class at the Art Students League. He'd been drawing his whole life, secretly filling sketchbooks with drawings of people riding the subway. But that year, he began painting in earnest—often depicting his and his friends' pets.

In 2005, Jawetz and his girlfriend moved back to Baltimore, where he'd attended Hopkins as an undergraduate. Now he works in a small studio off York Road in Homeland, not far from Christine Merrill's house. (They met while, yes, walking their dogs). His canvases are hung on the walls and propped up on easels, and a few art books—Lucian Freud, Egon Schiele—sit on a bookshelf. Jawetz, who paints with oils, often references their work, and that of others like Rembrandt and Degas, for their well-rendered paintings of dogs. "It's awesome for me to look at that tradition," he says. "How did Rembrandt paint a dog? Why did he put it in there? It's exciting to look at the history of art and not think this is a cheesy, kitschy thing."

He often paints his own pets—Pete, a white shepherd lab mix he found in a park, and three cats: the Count, Mr. Darcy, and Pepe. Jawetz also does commissioned paintings of other people's animals. "The techniques [of portraiture] haven't changed for centuries," he says. "To some, figurative work is so old-fashioned. But there is an endless amount of figurative imagery to create and explore." He tries to get to know his subjects before painting them, then communicate their personalities through his technique. His loose brushstrokes impart a sense of motion—an overall idea of the animal, rather than a detailed picture. "It's the impression rather than the accuracy of form," he says. "It's more true to the subject."

It takes Jawetz four to five weeks to do a commission. He first photographs the pet and meets the family, then does sketches before moving on to canvas—all the while coordinating with the client to make sure the "soul" of the painting is right. "When someone says my dog died or I just adopted [one], I feel it," he says. "I want to get a sense of where they're coming from and use that." Jawetz's prices, based on size, range from several hundred dollars to about $2,000. Jawetz also works with area rescue organizations, often donating a painting to their fundraising events. "I'm a pet person," he says. "I wouldn't do this if I weren't."

In 2007, he hung a solo show of dog paintings for the grand opening of the Yellow Dog Tavern in Canton. This month, to celebrate the bar's one-year anniversary, he's exhibiting a new series of pet paintings there. Called Human(e) Beings, the show will depict animals with their humans—an attempt to explore that easy-to-feel but hard-to-express pet-owner relationship. "It's very hard to talk about," he says. "It's very intimate. They know you in ways that we probably can't understand. They would know the most miniscule inflection in your voice or some gesture that you make that you're not even aware that you do. Trying to capture that relationship is a pretty cool challenge."

—Marianne Amoss is Urbanite's managing editor. She has a 10-month-old cat named Milla that she found on St. Paul Street.


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