Beyond the pet portrait: animals in contemporary painting

Animals are the subject that British painting has never been able to leave alone and has never entirely been willing to respect. They fill the commissioned end of the market, they sell reliably at every price point, and they are quietly treated by a great deal of the art world as a category one step above greetings cards. Which is odd, given that two of the most recognisable paintings ever made in this country are of a horse and a stag.

The subject nobody admits to taking seriously

The commissioned pet portrait is one of the most durable trades in art. It survived photography, it survived modernism, and it is currently being propped up further by the fact that a phone camera cannot produce an object you can hang above a fireplace. Almost every working painter has been asked to do one, and a substantial number quietly pay their rent this way while showing entirely different work under their own name.

The snobbery attached to this is worth examining rather than repeating. A commission is a constraint, and constraints have produced a great deal of the best painting in existence. What makes a pet portrait weak is not the subject but the brief, a likeness, flattering, against a neutral background, which forecloses everything a painter might otherwise do with an animal.

What animals used to carry

Historically the animal in painting was almost never just an animal. It carried status, allegory, virtue or threat. Stubbs's Whistlejacket, painted around 1762 and now in the National Gallery, is a horse rendered with anatomical seriousness usually reserved for people, against a bare ground that refuses to give it a setting or a story. Landseer's Monarch of the Glen, from 1851, is a stag doing the work of an entire national myth, which is precisely why it has been argued over ever since.

Both paintings do something a photograph cannot: they decide what the animal means before you have finished looking at it. That capacity is the reason the subject persists, and it is the part that contemporary work has picked back up.

The contemporary shift, from ownership to precarity

What has changed in the last two decades is the relationship the painting assumes between the viewer and the creature. Historical animal painting largely depicts possession: this horse is mine, this land is mine, this hunt happened. A great deal of current work depicts the opposite — animals as things that are disappearing, displaced, urbanised or reduced to an image of themselves.

You see it in the recurrence of urban foxes, gulls and pigeons in painting graduate shows, in work about industrial farming that avoids being a poster, and in a strand of painting that treats taxidermy and museum dioramas as its subject rather than the living animal. The tone is rarely didactic. It is more often a kind of unease, which is a difficult thing to sustain in a painting and interesting to watch people attempt.

London is a useful place to watch this happen, partly because the city's own animal population keeps insisting on itself. A fox on a Peckham roof at two in the morning is not a rural subject transplanted into an urban frame; it is a genuinely contemporary one, and painters here have been circling it for years without settling on a tone.

Why painters keep coming back to it

There is also a purely technical reason, and painters will admit to it more readily than to the thematic one. An animal is one of the hardest things to paint convincingly. Fur and feather demand a decision about how much to describe and how much to suggest, which is the central problem of representational painting in miniature. Muscle under skin has to be understood rather than copied. And the eye of an animal has to hold attention without becoming sentimental, which is where most attempts fail.

This is why the subject remains a reliable indicator of technical seriousness at graduate level. A painter who can handle a whippet's ribcage or the weight of a bird's body in flight has solved problems that abstraction lets you avoid.

Where to find the good version of it

The commissioned trade is easy to find and mostly sold through directories and social media. The more interesting work is not. It surfaces at degree shows across London between May and July, at open studio weekends through the autumn, and on the platforms that carry animal paintings by emerging artists alongside the rest of a graduate's output, which is the only context in which you can tell whether the animal work is a genuine preoccupation or a paying sideline. That distinction is usually visible within about four works.

It is also worth looking at drawing rather than only at painting. Animal drawing is where the observation happens, it is priced considerably lower, and it frequently contains the best work an artist has made in the subject.

Frequently asked questions

Is animal painting taken seriously by galleries?

Unevenly. The commissioned portrait trade is largely separate from the gallery system, while animal subjects handled as ecological or psychological material appear regularly in contemporary programmes. The subject is not the obstacle; the brief usually is.

Where can I see contemporary animal painting in London?

Art school degree shows between late May and early July are the most concentrated opportunity, followed by open studio weekends in the autumn. Both are free, and the artist is normally present to talk about the work.

How much does an original animal painting by a recent graduate cost?

Prices at this level are set by the artist rather than by a market, and reflect size, medium and time. Drawings and works on paper sit considerably below paintings on canvas, which makes them the usual entry point.

Should I commission a portrait of my own animal instead?

It is a legitimate purchase, but ask to see the artist's uncommissioned work first. A painter whose own practice involves animals will bring something to the commission that a likeness specialist will not.

How do I tell an original from a printed reproduction online?

Ask for a detail photograph taken at an angle. Real paint has raised texture that shows in raking light; a canvas print does not. A listing should also state whether the work is unique or part of an edition.