The Dog

The Dog is the name usually given to this painting by Francisco Goya, now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. It shows the head of a dog gazing upwards. The dog itself is almost lost in the vastness of the rest of the image, which is empty except for a dark sloping area near the bottom of the picture: an unidentifiable mass which conceals the animal's body. The placard for The Dog painting in The Prado indicates the dog is in distress, quite literally, drowning. The Dog is one of Goya's Black Paintings, which he painted directly onto the walls of his house sometime between 1819 and 1823 when he was in his mid 70s, living alone and suffering from acute mental and physical distress. He did not intend the paintings for public exhibition, and they were not removed from the house until 50 years after Goya had left. The painting is divided into two unequal sections: an upper, dirty ochre "sky" and a smaller sloping curved dark brown section which fades to black as it slopes up to the right. Over the top of this lower section the dog's head can be seen, its snout lifted, its ears pulled back and its eyes looking up and towards the right. A faint dark shape looms over the dog; this is sometimes considered to be damage or an intentional inclusion, but is generally seen as an artifact from the earlier painting that decorated the wall before Goya overpainted it with The Dog. The enigmatic depiction of the dog has led to myriad interpretations of Goya's intentions. The painting is often seen a symbolic depiction of man's futile struggle against malevolent forces; the black sloping mass which envelopes the dog is imagined to be quicksand, earth or some other material in which the dog has become buried. Having struggled unsuccessfully to free itself, it can now do nothing but look skywards hoping for a divine intervention that will never come. The vast swath of "sky" which makes up the bulk of the picture intensifies the feeling of the dog's isolation and the hopelessness of its situation. Others see the dog as cautiously raising its head above the black mass, afraid of something outside the painting's field of view, or perhaps an image of abandonment, loneliness, and neglect. Robert Hughes says "We do not know what it means, but its pathos moves us on a level below narrative." Goya's influence is apparent in the dog in Pierre Bonnard's 1910 The Red-Checkered Tablecloth, although the mood of Bonnard's cheerfully unambiguous painting is directly opposite to Goya's portentously obscure piece.