GREENWICH, CT.- The Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT, USA, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA, are organizing for 2006 an imaginative survey of the theme of the dog in Western art from the Renaissance to today. The exhibition Best in Show: Dogs in Art from the Renaissance to the Present debuts in the spring of 2006 at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, (through August 27, 2006) and then travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in Texas (Oct. 1 – Jan. 1, 2007). The Greenwich, CT, showing is generously sponsored by The Citigroup Private Bank and the Charles M. and Deborah G. Royce Exhibition Fund. Media sponsor for the Bruce Museum showing is Moffly Publications Inc.

Although the exhibition promises to be highly entertaining and thoroughly accessible to everyone, it will also reveal the high artistic standards that depictions of this most favored and domesticated of creatures have commanded throughout the history of art. The exhibition will also demonstrate the inexhaustible mutability of dogs as an emblem of the major cultural and social concerns of Western civilization over the last 500 years.

The exhibition will feature approximately fifty of the most significant and provocative paintings, sculptures, and photographs of dogs ever created by such distinguished artists as Paulus Potter, Jan Weenix, Gerrit Dou, Frans Snyders, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, George Stubbs, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Andrew Wyeth, Maurizio Cattelan, Ron Mueck, William Wegman, and Lucien Freud. From the nobility and drama of the hounds of the hunt depicted by Renaissance and Baroque artists, to the luxury of Rococo lapdogs, to the high and low sentiment of the Victorian era’s animals, to the studied modernity of the pampered pet of the Impressionists, and finally to the wit and irony of the canines of Pop and Post-Modernism, dogs have always appeared alongside and often in the place of their owners.

The renowned art historian Robert Rosenblum is the principal author of the catalogue, which will be published by Yale University Press. His essay will offer a comprehensive visual survey of the changes in meaning of canine imagery over time. Exploring the significant role dogs have played in the history of art, Rosenblum wrote in his 1988 publication, The Dog in Art from Rococo to Post-Modernism, “the depiction of dogs in art mirrors closely the familiar sequence of styles and emotions in Western art and history. To speak of a Rococo dog, or a Romantic dog, or a Victorian dog is, in fact, to make perfect sense.” Three additional essays in the catalogue complement Mr. Rosenblum’s: Edgar Peters Bowron, The Audrey Jones Beck Curator of European Art, MFAH, discusses the dog in Renaissance and Baroque art; well-known dog-painting specialist William Secord writes about the development of purebred dogs; and Dr. Carolyn Rose Rebbert, Curator of Science at the Bruce Museum, offers an essay on canine science.