Lot 1105 Dα

"Sit! Stay, stay...", and yet it again took too long to put the dog in the picture! What dog owners know from today's attempts to photograph their four-legged friend spontaneously but as favourably as possible with a mobile phone, Jacob Philipp Hackert must have experienced in a very similar way - in his medium of painting, of course. In her expertise on this painting, Claudia Nordhoff notes brushstrokes in many details, "which reveal that the dog portrait was created in the countryside and relatively quickly - perhaps with the intention of completing it before the dog moved." The quality that Hackert had achieved in this way convinced him so much that he signed and dated the painting and labelled it with the reference to Florence as the place of origin. It was probably not his own, but the dog of Charles Nassau, 3rd Earl Cowper, at whose Villa Palmieri in Fiesole near Florence Hackert was a guest.