Dogs with Careers – an 1800s oil portrait
Round 1
Image 2 — "Bloodhound dog as Victorian butler." : 3.35
Impeccably painted, and impeccably unsurprising — the drapery, the gloves and the cut crystal are all handled with real tonal control, but the picture answers the theme with the first idea anyone would have and then stops. What keeps it down is a seam at the collar: the head is lit frontally while the body sits in studio shadow, so the bloodhound reads as mounted on the butler rather than living inside him.
Image 4 — "A policeman. German shepherd, of course" : 3.60
The weather does the acting here — wet gaslight, a cab dissolving into fog, one cold highlight on the custodian helmet — and it buys the picture a genuine mood. But the dog is only wearing the job, not doing it: alert head, badge, truncheon held like a prop, no moment and no incident, so that fine street behind him is a setting for nothing.
Image 3 — "A Victorian astronomer Doberman Pinscher portrait" : 3.70
The boldest idea of the round — an astronomer is a career nobody else thought to hand a dog, and the burgundy velvet and open star chart give it real romance. What costs it is a slip of register: the surface is lacquered and backlit like a digital matte rather than laid down in paint, and the desk is so crowded with telescopes, globes, scrolls and lamp that the sitter competes with his own props for the eye.
Image 1 — "The Last Honest Cabman" : 3.95
This is the only entry that painted a life instead of a costume. The jowls, the shabby greatcoat, the reins held loose in a paw that has held them for thirty years — all of it says a working man at the end of a long shift, and the fog, the gaslamp and the two dim figures behind him build the London he has to drive through. The title earns its keep as well: "the last honest" turns a portrait into an elegy, and the picture is melancholy enough to carry the weight. The paws soften where they grip the reins, but that is a small tax on the one image here that has weather, story and a face. My winner.