538 The Dog Book 



1580. It will be noted that the horses are all of the broad Flemish type, and 

 this being his type of animal portraiture it is not specially indicative of heav- 

 iness in Italian dogs of his day, even if we find them animals of great sub- 

 stance, his mastins being quite as heavy comparatively as his alaunts. The 

 latter are distinctly Molossian in type, while the two mastins in the fore- 

 ground are somewhat similar to the dogs attacking the two wild boars in the 

 centre of the picture, one having the nearer boar by the ear; though this is 

 by no means positive. 



Our next illustration is an exquisite etching by Unger of one of Snyders' 

 most spirited hunting pictures. This can be approximately dated 1620, for 

 he was born in 1579 and died in 1657. There is nothing in the way of a 

 Great Dane in this, but as it is the keynote to some of those which follow it is 

 better to put it here. These are pure mastins; and allowing for the advance of 

 art from the time of the French miniatures in the Gaston Phoebus book, there 

 is no room for question as to the identity of these dogs. We draw particular at- 

 tention to the extended dog in the foreground, because we will make refer- 

 ence to that in the chapter pertaining to the Irish wolfhound. A hundred 

 years later than the Snyders' painting there was no lack of artists who did 

 excellent work as sport illustrators. From this group we take three pictures. 

 The one by Desportes is doubtless the oldest one, for he was born in 1661, 

 while Oudry was twenty-five years his junior. We therefore say 1700 for 

 the Desportes, 1720 for the Oudry; and, as we have previously said 1740 

 for Ridinger's work, we leave it at that. In giving a date in this manner it is 

 not a positive statement, but a guide as to the probable date. When a date 

 is positively known it is so stated. 



Desportes affected the hound type in his dogs; knowing which we can 

 only say that that was his conception of what we must now call the French 

 matin. Oudry gives us another dog altogether, and it takes quite a stretch 

 of the imagination to accept the rough dogs in his "Wolf at Bay" as of 

 the mastin type or breed. The one that has the throat grip is more like the 

 Snyders dog, while the farther dog on the wolf's back is what was then called 

 the Danish dog, the grand Danois of Buffon. The Ridinger boar-hunt gives 

 us that artist's conception of the dog which Snyders painted; for it must be 

 borne in mind that these are not dog portraits, but the type of dog as it ap- 

 peared to the artist. We have the same thing in modern animal painters, 

 and one can tell at a glance a Tracy or an Osthaus setter, or a Muss-Arnolt 

 pointer. 



