Tag Archives: 19th century interiors with dogs

Title: Dogs

Artist: Jan Stobbaerts  (1839–1914)

Date: between 1858 and 1914

Medium: oil on canvas

Dimensions: Height: 36.5 cm (14.3 in); Width: 45.5 cm (17.9 in)

What I like about this painting:

These dogs have the run of the house. They’re not too well groomed and probably spend a certain amount of time roaming the neighborhood. Both dogs have personality, and both are unrepentant ruffians.

This is a pair of canine hooligans bent on having a good time.

About the Artist, via Wikipedia [1]:

Jan Stobbaerts or Jan-Baptist Stobbaerts (18 March 1838 – 25 November 1914) was a Belgian painter and printmaker. He is known for his scenes with animals, landscapes, genre scenes and portraits or artists. With his dark-brown studio tones and forceful depiction of trivial subjects, Stobbaerts was a pioneer of Realism and ‘autochthonous’ Impressionism in Belgium.

While in his early works he painted scenes with pets in kitchen interiors in which the genre and anecdotal elements prevailed, from 1880 onwards stables and barns became a dominant theme in his work.^[5] The compositions in this period were painted with an almost photographic realism.^[8] His sober monochrome palette developed to a more balanced color scheme and he gave more attention to the effect of light.

Around 1890, Stobbaerts’ style underwent a considerable change likely under the influence of his discovery of Impressionism and his personal search for resolving the problem of light. Stobbaerts abandoned the detailed realism in favour of a very personal sfumato of light. His style became velvety, his brushwork looser and the paint more fluid. His paintings of the 1890s depicting scenes around the river Woluwe were made with an opaque, somewhat transparent paste. The artist concentrated on the effect of light and the forms, while they remained recognizable, became less clear as if seen through a soft-focus lens. The subject matter itself became less important. [1]

Credits and Attributions:

Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Jan Stobbaerts – Dogs.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Jan_Stobbaerts_-_Dogs.jpg&oldid=354839586 (accessed July 9, 2021).

[1] Wikipedia contributors, “Jan Stobbaerts,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jan_Stobbaerts&oldid=1025124429 (accessed July 9, 2021).