Dog painting was serious business in eighteenth-century France. Jean-Baptiste Oudry's Water Spaniel Confronting a Heron and Study of a Hound Baying are more than simple studies of animals.
Join Dr. Amy Freund, assistant professor of art history at Texas Christian University, for a closer look at these paintings where the dogs' bodies stand in for their owners' and viewers' human bodies, serving as proxies in the era's most pressing debates about personhood, violence, and privilege.
