Norfolk or Water Spaniel

A curly brown-and-white dog occupies almost the whole foreground, its body directed left while its face turns towards us. One forepaw leaves the ground; the tail rises at the opposite end of the body. In this example of his animal painting, George Stubbs makes an apparently quiet standing pose into an encounter full of small changes of direction. ^[1]

The painting dates from 1778. Yale identifies its medium as beeswax and oil on panel and gives its dimensions as 80.6 × 97.2 centimetres. It belongs to the Yale Center for British Art’s Paul Mellon Collection, accession B2001.2.10. ^[2]

A large presence in a watery landscape

The broad flank stretches sideways across the picture, but the head refuses to remain within that profile. The face turns outwards, bringing both eyes and the length of the muzzle into view. The broadside body and outward-facing head establish different directions. That difference gives the composition an immediate focus without requiring a person, a thrown object or a visible quarry to explain it. ^[1]

The nearer foreleg descends towards a substantial planted paw. Behind it, the other foreleg bends and lifts, leaving a narrow opening beneath the chest. At the rear, the legs separate into different angles. These unequal supports interrupt the long horizontal body. The posture is specific enough to reward close looking, but it does not establish whether the dog is pausing during movement or responding to an unseen signal. ^[1]

Brown ears frame an unevenly divided face. A broad white passage runs down one side of the forehead and muzzle, while darker hair encloses the other eye. Small brown marks interrupt the paler surface. The nose forms a darker, rounded centre near the lower end of the head. These asymmetries make the face recognisable as a particular arrangement of features, rather than a diagram of a generic dog. ^[1]

The coat changes as it passes over the body. Around the ears it forms longer, hanging masses; across the torso and upper legs it gathers into pale curls and short brown marks. Large dark patches interrupt the white flank and connect with the darker back. The patches remain legible at a distance, while their irregular edges and the smaller curls encourage a much slower examination. ^[1]

The tail carries this changing texture into the sky. A dark lower length rises towards a broad white plume, whose loose edges spread beyond the firmer outline of the hindquarters. Its brightness answers the pale chest at the other end of the animal. Between those two light masses, the darker markings give the long body a broken rhythm instead of a single uninterrupted band. ^[1]

The landscape is more than a green backing. Long leaves and clusters of small pale flowers press into the foreground, close to the paws. Water passes behind the bank, while a tree’s descending branches fill much of the lower left. The plants establish the viewer’s low position and bring the surface of the ground close, even as the water opens a distance beyond it. ^[1]

The dog rises above those smaller forms. Its head crosses an open area of sky, and the back is set against clouds rather than a wall of foliage. A narrow stretch of distant land appears beneath the belly. Stubbs keeps several depths available at once: plants nearest to us, the animal immediately beyond them, then water, trees and sky. The dog’s prominence grows from that arrangement, not from a stated measurement of its height. ^[1]

Blue and warm pink-grey passages divide the clouded sky. Their comparatively broad shapes contrast with the busy curls, spotted muzzle and pointed leaves below. The animal thus belongs to its setting through colour and light while remaining much more intricately described than the distance. Nothing in that relationship requires the landscape to be read as a portrait of a particular estate. ^[1]

Names and classification

Yale retains the alternative in the title, Norfolk or Water Spaniel. It also associates this painting with a much less specific title in the Royal Academy’s 1778 exhibition catalogue. ^[2]

The printed catalogue lists George Stubbs at Somerset Street, Portman Square. His entries include a horse portrait, followed by number 299, “Ditto of a dog”, then a portrait of two dogs and a gentleman preparing to shoot. The word ditto carries forward the preceding word portrait. It names a kind of picture and a kind of subject, without supplying the dog’s breed, owner or personal name. ^[17]

That concise wording matters when reading a much fuller modern title. The original printed entry offers no pedigree and no detailed account of appearance. It also places a single dog and a pair of dogs among separate submissions by the same artist. The catalogue can establish what was announced to visitors; connecting its terse entry with a surviving painting depends upon the subsequent history of identification. ^[17]

Later dog literature demonstrates how unsettled the name Norfolk could remain. Vero Shaw’s The Illustrated Book of the Dog, published in 1881, described a variety extensively crossed with other spaniels and difficult to define consistently. He discussed liver-and-white colouring, flecking and a white facial blaze, but also acknowledged substantial differences in height among dogs called Norfolk. His chapter combined descriptions of appearance with the needs of sportsmen and the points used in judging. ^[18]

Shaw’s Norfolk worked on land and in water: it entered thick cover and recovered waterfowl. Shaw also noted that it usually gave voice while searching: sound belonged to his account of working ability as well as colour and build. Yet the same account admitted that pedigree was slight and that many crossbred dogs travelled under the name. Such a text is evidence of nineteenth-century classification, not a certificate for Stubbs’s sitter a century earlier. Resemblance between a painted marking and a later description cannot supply the missing chain of breeding. ^[18]

By 1910, Robert Leighton’s Dogs and All about Them described the old Norfolk name within an account of the English Springer. He reported debate about the propriety of Norfolk and the adoption of Springer by the Sporting Spaniel Society. He also explained the effort to obtain a more uniform type through an agreed standard and scale of points. The vocabulary was being organised through clubs, breeding and exhibition practice. ^[19]

Leighton’s discussion provides a later chapter in the history of naming. It does not make every earlier brown-and-white spaniel an example of a modern registered breed. His concern with uniformity itself reveals the distance between a specific painted animal and the more regulated categories that later writers wished to establish. ^[19]

Wax and oil in context

John Mills and Raymond White’s investigation of Stubbs’s materials and techniques, published in 1985, analysed ten paintings dated between 1772 and 1800. They used gas chromatography and, for most works, mass spectrometry. The results included mixtures of wax and resin, together with oils or fats whose identification sometimes remained uncertain. The spaniel is not among the ten pictures in their table. Their study supplies a wider material context, with differences between paintings central to its findings. ^[20]

The three earliest pictures they tested lacked drying oil and a prepared ground; works from The Reapers of 1783 showed drying oil among the ingredients. The authors also revised earlier interpretations and considered how conservation materials might complicate analysis. They linked Stubbs’s experiments to eighteenth-century attempts to reconstruct ancient encaustic painting. This is a history of changing practice, not an exact recipe for the spaniel. A named medium can locate a picture within that enquiry while leaving the proportions, application and treatment of its particular paint to be established separately. ^[20]

The recoverable ownership history

Yale’s provenance reaches Harold Davies by about 1930, followed by Leggatt Brothers and Lady Forteviot. Frank Partridge & Sons and Arthur Ackermann & Sons jointly handled the painting in 1960, when Paul Mellon bought it. It entered Yale through his bequest in 2001. The picture had left Lady Forteviot’s collection privately, before her larger auction sale in 1969. The record leaves the earlier chain incomplete and does not identify an original commissioner or name the dog. ^[2]

Malcolm Warner’s published 2001 entry, later echoed in Yale’s gallery labels, read the animal’s watery world with a melancholy cast. This is a curatorial interpretation of the portrait’s effect, rather than a documented account of the dog’s feelings. ^[2]

Copies and a modern transformation

Later images require their own identities. In 2020, Sotheby’s catalogued a twentieth-century painting explicitly after Stubbs’s spaniel: oil on canvas, measuring 76.2 × 101.6 centimetres. Its dog motif is recognisable, but a house appears in the left distance and a large tree occupies the right. Those additions belong to the later copy. They cannot be used to identify an estate behind Stubbs’s original commission. ^[21]

Ged Quinn made a more deliberate transformation in I Like America and America Likes Me. Paul Petro Contemporary Art’s exhibition text traces a later print to Quinn’s painting of 2004 and explicitly identifies Stubbs’s 1778 spaniel as its starting point. A Royal United Hospital Bath publication reproduced a print of the composition in 2008, captioning it 2007. The painting and the subsequent print should therefore remain distinct objects. ^{[22] [23]}

In Quinn’s reworking, the spaniel’s coat carries a map of the United States. The gallery connected the title with Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance of the same name. This is a modern work making new use of an eighteenth-century animal portrait, not evidence of a political programme concealed in Stubbs’s original. The familiar dog becomes a vehicle for another artist’s references and concerns. ^[22]