Dingo

George Stubbs painted Portrait of a Large Dog (Dingo) in 1772 for Joseph Banks, following Banks's participation in the first Endeavour voyage. The National Maritime Museum at Greenwich holds the picture as ZBA5755 and describes its material as beeswax on mahogany panel. It measures 610 by 711 millimetres, with a panel thickness of eight millimetres. Its companion is The Kongouro from New Holland. The pair gave unfamiliar Australian animals a substantial presence in British painting, although their production depended on information carried across an ocean. ^[1]

Looking at the painting

The animal moves from right to left across a shallow strip of ground. Its lowered head extends almost horizontally from the long back, while the tail curves away from the rump towards the opposite side. This arrangement makes the body a strong lateral shape. The legs introduce shorter diagonals beneath it, breaking the long sweep without interrupting the overall direction. There is no human attendant, leash or architectural enclosure to explain where the dog belongs. The animal occupies the foreground on its own. ^[1]

Above it, clouds spread across most of the picture. The pale sky opens around the dark body rather than offering a crowded setting of competing objects. A darker cloud mass hangs above the head and shoulders, while the ground recedes into low, distant forms. At the right, a small area of taller vegetation marks the edge of the animal's passage. The composition offers enough landscape to establish space, but keeps its main subject legible. Sky, earth and animal form broad, distinct areas rather than a continuous screen of detail. ^[1]

The result combines movement with an unusually clear outline. The head reaches towards the left edge, but the tail and planted feet hold the figure within the picture. The large interval of sky prevents the animal from filling its surroundings, even though it dominates the foreground. These relationships can be followed without inventing an episode beyond the frame. Nothing within this broad arrangement identifies an encounter between hunter and prey. ^[1]

What could Stubbs know?

Greenwich explains that no living animal was available to Stubbs for this commission. It describes him working from Banks's written and spoken accounts, while assigning Parkinson's sketches and a stuffed or inflated skin specifically to the kangaroo. That distinction matters: the resources described for one member of a pair cannot simply be transferred to the other. The museum's account establishes a mediated encounter, rather than a documented session with a living dingo. ^[1]

Other authorities give conflicting reconstructions. The export expert's report says that no dingo specimens were known to have returned aboard Endeavour and proposes Banks's recollections as Stubbs's source. The National Museum of Australia instead states that Banks brought back a native-dog skin from which the portrait was painted. These are materially different accounts of what reached London. Neither should disappear into a confident story that Stubbs inflated a dingo pelt. The precise studio resources remain unsettled. ^{[16] [17]}

Banks's journal helps explain how uncertain animal knowledge could be before the painting existed. On 1 May 1770, he recorded clawed footprints resembling those of a dog or wolf. On 29 June, an American midshipman reported seeing a wolf resembling animals he knew in America; he had fired at it without killing it. On 6 July, Banks recorded another sighting by the Polynesian voyager Tupia, but made clear that calling it a wolf was his own inference from the description. His general account of Australian quadrupeds also distinguished animals caught from those reported by others. Such entries preserve several stages of knowledge: a trace, an encounter, a spoken description and an attempted classification. They do not identify a particular animal as the sitter for Stubbs's panel. They also caution against treating every wolf-like or dog-like creature in the voyage records as an unequivocal modern identification. ^[18]

A related dispute concerns the companion painting. In a retrospective exhibition essay, Angus Trumble challenged the familiar story of an inflated kangaroo skin, emphasising a skull and Parkinson's drawings among the documented resources. His argument concerns the kangaroo. It neither proves that a dingo skin existed nor settles the contrary claim that none returned. Its relevance is methodological: memorable accounts of how an artist reconstructed an unfamiliar creature can become more definite in repetition than their documentary foundations permit. ^[19]

An Australian animal before a British portrait

The picture's importance within European painting should be understood alongside a much longer history. The National Museum of Australia describes dingoes within First Nations companionship, hunting, kinship, story and ceremony, and notes their presence in rock art and burials. Those relationships were not created by Banks's commission. The London portrait belongs to a particular history of representation across distance; it cannot stand for the beginning of human knowledge of the animal. Reading it with that boundary in mind changes what the language of novelty can reasonably mean. ^[17]

Modern appearance also requires care. Sue Burrell and Mark Eldridge's Australian Museum account uses Canis familiaris with the designation breed Dingo. It describes substantial variation in coat colour, including darker animals in forested regions, as well as the erect ears and bushy tail familiar from many dingo images. A reader expecting every dingo to have a pale ginger coat could therefore mistake a stereotype for an identification test. Conversely, recognising some dog-like features in Stubbs's painting does not recover its animal's ancestry or establish its precise relationship to any living population. Modern classifications answer questions that the eighteenth-century phrase “large dog” leaves open. ^[20]

The voyage itself combined several purposes. The Admiralty's additional instructions of 30 July 1768 asked Cook to observe animals, vegetation, soil and other natural productions while also surveying coasts and improving navigational knowledge. Their opening connected exploration with national prestige, trade and maritime power. For the continent Cook was instructed to seek, they required the inhabitants' consent when taking possession of suitable places; a separate instruction concerning islands did not repeat that condition. Natural history and territorial ambitions thus appear within the same document. That connection supplies a concrete context for the animal images carried back into British cultural life. It does not require the painting to be treated as a simple emblem with a single political meaning. ^[21]

Helen McCormack places Banks's collecting within the domestic spaces through which scientific knowledge circulated in London. Banks's collections moved from New Burlington Street to Soho Square, where books, specimens, drawings and the work of artists formed an interconnected enterprise. In her account, images were active parts of the production and communication of knowledge. The Banks animal paintings consequently belong within a culture that valued both visual information and the skills of accomplished artists. Their setting was not confined to a remote field encounter or a finished canvas considered in isolation: it included the London rooms in which objects were arranged, compared and discussed. This gives the wider relationship between animals, science and empire a specific institutional and social form. ^[22]

Material, exhibition and ownership

John Mills and Raymond White's 1985 technical study examined the media of ten Stubbs paintings. Their table includes wax, resin, non-drying oil or fat, and drying oil in different combinations; neither Banks animal appears among the ten works. The earlier pictures in their sample differed from the later group, in which drying oil was identified. Their discussion also explains difficulties in distinguishing related substances analytically. These findings establish variety within the artist's practice, while leaving the precise mixture used for the dingo untested by this study. They provide comparative evidence for his technique, enamel and printmaking, rather than an object-specific recipe. ^[23]

The export report records the Society of Artists exhibition of 1773, where the kangaroo was number 318 and its companion followed as number 319, “Ditto, of a large dog”. Its provenance runs from Banks through the family of Dorothea, his widow, to Mary Keith. In 1970, Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox handled the sale to Parham's owners, Clive and Alicia Pearson. Exhibition and descent give the pictures a shared history without making their individual animal evidence identical. ^[16]

A different dingo in print

A distinct image appeared in The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay in 1789. The National Gallery of Victoria holds an impression of Dog of New South Wales, catalogued as an etching by P. Mazell, acting as artist and engraver. Its inscription identifies John Stockdale as publisher and gives 21 September 1789 as the publication date. This is a later natural-history image, rather than a print credited as reproducing Stubbs. Its separate maker, date and publication context matter when tracing how British readers encountered the animal. The distinction matters within the wider history of prints. ^[24]

The accompanying 1789 account makes the difference unusually tangible. It identifies the animal from which its plate was taken as a female then living with the Marchioness of Salisbury at Hatfield House, sent by Governor Phillip as a gift to Mr Nepean. It also mentions a second animal owned by Mr Lascelles. Here a printed image comes with an explicit account of living animals in Britain. The text describes an animal that lapped like a dog, preferred uncooked rabbits or chickens and reportedly neither barked nor growled when irritated. It then recounts violent encounters with other animals and reaches strongly negative expectations about taming. Those judgements belong to the historical observers and the conditions of captivity they describe. They are evidence for the representation of dingoes, rather than a timeless explanation of their nature. ^[25]

Collecting and reimagining the picture

The pair's passage into a public collection introduced another debate about where their histories should be told. Art Fund records its support for the National Maritime Museum acquisition in 2013, with a total cost of £4,455,000 and assistance involving the Wolfson Foundation. The pictures had remained privately owned until a sale to an overseas buyer in late 2012 prompted efforts to retain them in Britain. The acquisition changed their institutional setting as well as their ownership: works long preserved together within private collections became available for interpretation within a museum. The price belongs to the pair, rather than to the dingo alone. ^[26]

Mary Gearin's contemporary ABC report preserves the opposing institutional claims. The National Gallery of Australia expressed disappointment and argued that the works had greater relevance to Australian art than to British maritime history. Christine Riding, then the Maritime Museum's senior paintings curator, emphasised their importance as records arising from Cook's voyage. The report also describes the Australian gallery's negotiations through an intermediary over roughly three years. These positions illuminate why keeping the paintings together did not remove disagreement about their destination. The same objects connected British patronage and production with Australian subjects and histories. Their acquisition was therefore a dispute over the framing of an interconnected past, rather than simply a question of which institution could display two attractive animals. ^[27]

Contemporary artists have also returned to the image's uncertainties. Anna Glynn describes her work George Stubbs' 1773, Inflatable Dingo in a 2019 finalist announcement, explaining that she reimagined Stubbs's silhouette together with a menagerie of his reference material. The title and her accompanying pelt story belong to her interpretation; they should not replace the original painting's 1772 date or resolve its disputed model. What matters for this later reception is her deliberate reuse of a recognisable but problematic animal image. Her stated interest is in the strangeness of early European animal depictions and the natural-history encounters that generated them. ^[28]