298 The Dog Book 



the custom among compilers of dog books. Daniel said the buyer was 

 Sir Richard Symons, but he told the story many years after the transaction, 

 and the Sporting Magazine account published about three months after 

 it took place is much more likely to be correct. 



We miss a history of the breed such as Mr. Laverack gave of the various 

 strains of setter existing in England from the early part of the nineteenth 

 century up to about i860, but M^e do know that as in setters so in pointers, 

 various noblemen and gentlemen sportsmen had their several kennels 

 and bred more or less along fancy lines of colour. When we have no liter- 

 ature to turn to, the next best, perhaps the actual best thing to refer to, is 

 the work of the painter. We have given one or two copies of Landseer's 

 work, and will have a good many more before '* The Dog Book" is finished, 

 but we have never considered him a dog artist. He seemed to have not the 

 slightest idea whether the dog he was painting was a good or a poor one, 

 and some of his drawings were shockingly bad. For the sake of his repu- 

 tation we would gladly have omitted the pointer shown with the Irish 

 setter "setting a hare" and given as an early drawing of the Irish setter, 

 but the two had to go in. At the head of the dog painters of the last cen- 

 tury there has been no one to compare with Abraham Cooper. Gilpin 

 and Reinagle preceded him, and both did beautiful work, particularly 

 Gilpin. Moreland also introduced portrait dogs in some of his work, 

 but the man we like is Cooper, and a great deal of his work consists of 

 portraits of selected dogs. It is to such artists as those named that we 

 owe our knowledge of what some of the best dogs of their day looked like. 

 There is no question as to Gilpin's drawing being true to nature, so his 

 representations of Dash, Pluto and Juno must be accepted as correct por- 

 traits of those dogs, and we would not think much of what Colonel Thornton 

 accomplished in the improvement of the pointer if those were the only 

 portraits of his dogs or dogs of that period; but that they were not 

 typical of the pointer of 1800 is shown by the beautifully drawn pointer 

 in the painting of Mr. Fleming going hawking. Some of Reinagle's 

 pointers are portraits of bad dogs, such as the one in the "Sportsman's 

 Repository," which is a goggle-eyed, lumpy-headed dog, with an abnor- 

 mal length of neck. To represent his work we have taken the pointer 

 illustrated in Jesse's "Anecdotes," 1846 edition, which is a very 

 different dog and a good one. It will be observed from the "T" 

 branded on the side that it is a portrait of one of Colonel Thornton's 



