The Dog's Gaze

From award-winning cultural historian, an enlightening and unique meditation on the presence of dogs in art, from the Paleolithic era to the present, and what our intertwined human-canine relationship reveals about human nature

Long before the phrase man’s best friend became common parlance, dogs were already standing beside us in art as in life. In The Dog’s Gaze, the historian Thomas W. Laqueur invites us to explore why they feature more than any other animal in the ways in which we picture ourselves and our stories.

Dogs have been ubiquitous in the worldmaking of visual artists as far back as the Paleolithic age. Looking across the Western tradition, from Giotto to Goya and Rubens to Rego, Laqueur shows what their presence—as hunting partners, beloved friends, and even conduits to the afterlife—reveals about our own ways of seeing and how we want to be remembered. Far from being mere motifs, dogs are an integral and intentional element of the images in which they appear: They provide narrative coherence; they look out and bear witness, often on the artist’s behalf; they illuminate our understanding of morality and melancholy and some, like us, become celebrities. Indeed, as Laqueur reveals, dogs in art are our social doppelgängers, our companions in looking and being.

Richly illustrated and lovingly written, The Dog’s Gaze is a unique visual history that examines the remarkable social bond between two species, shedding new light on the human condition through the eyes of our canine companions.