American & European Art

Literature:

William Secord, Dog Painting, A History of the Dog in Art, Woodbridge, 2009, p. 239, no. 295, illus.

Given its scale and content, John Sargent Noble’s Off Duty is among the most significant works of its type to come to auction in recent years. The painting blends the themes of British dog painting with still life to conjure a fantasy of the medieval. In the painting, two dogs rest with glistening armor strewn about them on the stable floor.

Noble completed variations on this subject, reportedly including one exhibited at The Royal Academy where a bloodhound licks clean his master’s bloody armor, increasing the stakes of the narrative while also highlighting the hound’s capacity for tenderness (“Our Van”, Baily’s Magazine of Sports and Pasttimes, Vol. 35, 1880, p. 365). 

Beyond the medieval references, such a scene surely recalls the Archaic amphora by Exekias showing Achilles and Ajax playing a dice game. Like in the amphora, armor lays at the hounds’ side in a moment of calm between battles. One dog chews its paw – perhaps a reference to Achilles, whose heel would be his downfall. Such classical references would have delighted the educated nineteenth-century viewer, who would be familiar with the vase through printed reproductions or from the variant held at the British Museum.