Brown and White Norfolk or Water Spaniel

Brown and White Norfolk or Water Spaniel was painted by George Stubbs in 1778, during the period in which he was experimenting with beeswax and oil as an alternative to conventional oil paint — a technique he pursued throughout the 1770s and 1780s in search of greater durability and luminosity. The Norfolk Spaniel depicted here no longer exists as a distinct breed; it was used by eighteenth-century sportsmen to flush and retrieve game from water, and the name gradually disappeared after the Kennel Club reorganized spaniel classifications in the early twentieth century. Stubbs painted dogs throughout his career with the same anatomical precision he brought to horses. Born in Liverpool in 1724 to a leather-worker, he was largely self-taught, spending eighteen months dissecting horses in a Lincolnshire farmhouse before moving to London around 1758–59 to establish his practice. Although celebrated today as one of Britain's greatest animal painters, Stubbs never attained full membership in the Royal Academy, reflecting the lower status traditionally accorded to sporting and animal subjects within academic art. The painting entered the Yale Center for British Art as part of the Paul Mellon Collection.