Dogs follow the direction of a person’s gaze almost as well as another person can—better, in fact, when they are motivated to, because dogs are relentless. They track the movements of our eyeballs to see what we’re looking at so that they can look at it too, and they pester us to look just as attentively at them. When my late golden retriever had something to show me—a ball that had rolled under a fence, a man with an irregular gait—he didn’t always bark. Sometimes he stared first at the ball or man, then back at me, then at the ball or man again, until I retrieved the ball or moved away from the man. People speak with their eyes all the time, but every so often I’d be struck with wonder that a consciousness as radically different from mine could communicate so effectively. Then I’d love him even more, if such a thing were possible, and feel a little insecure. My dog was putting himself on my conversational level, as it were, or maybe the better way to say it is he was yanking me up to his level.
The first animals to be domesticated, dogs began the process about 20,000 years ago, and the more time they spent in our field of vision, the longer they could maintain eye contact. Evolutionary theory offers an explanation: Dogs that could follow the human gaze and predict human actions had more success as hunting or herding partners.
In a 1977 essay called “Why Look at Animals?” the art critic and novelist John Berger recounts an origin myth about the importance of seeing and being seen by creatures unlike us. To summarize a convoluted tale: A long time ago, before people had tamed animals, an animal looked at a person and the person looked at the animal, and the person saw that the animal was different and that they couldn’t understand each other. And yet the person recognized a fellow being with its own power, “comparable with human power but never coinciding with it,” and realized that to be seen by the animal was to become more fully oneself. We felt less lonely as a species. But then, Berger writes, industrial capitalism reduced animals to things—toys, future packages of meat, even “the new animal puppet: the urban pet.” We lost “a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange.”
Berger was right about the sense of wholeness that comes from seeing oneself in an animal’s eyes, and he was right to think that economic forces could undermine that connection, but he was wrong about pets. I wonder whether he had a dog. Or a cat. In 1997, Jacques Derrida held a seminar on the experience of seeing himself being seen by his cat as he stood naked before her. Published as a book during the aughts, the lecture became a key part of a revisionist philosophy of the human-animal interaction. Derrida undoes the solipsistic Cartesian formula for self-knowledge, “I think, therefore I am,” and substitutes a vision of the self as seen through the animal’s eyes. Derrida feels shame before the cat, he reports, but is not sure why. Perhaps he was “ashamed of being as naked as an animal,” he thinks. Soon he is asking, “Who am I, therefore?”
Dogs must have provoked the same jittery, uncanny-valley feelings in early artists as Derrida’s cat did in him, because dogs appear more than any other domesticated animal in prehistoric and ancient art. Dog art goes back nearly 10,000 years, which is when early-Holocene people made giant paintings on rocks in Saudi Arabia showing people and dogs collaborating in a hunt. Some dogs in the pack seem to be looking up at a human. Thousands of years later, man and dog had grown so comfortable around each other that they didn’t need to trade glances. On an ancient-Greek vase from between 500 and 450 B.C.E., a man and his dog inspect an ithyphallic herm, a priapic statue with the head of the god Hermes; they both seem to express amused astonishment. The man is pulling the statue’s beard, as if testing whether it’s real. The dog has almost passed the figure but pauses and swivels his head back and up, doing a double take at the size of its organ.
Thomas W. Laqueur’s The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History tells the story of the watchful dog. The book starts in the deep past and goes to the present, surveying much of the science and philosophy of the human-dog relationship. But Laqueur’s chief interest lies in the Western pictorial tradition, especially from the Renaissance into the 20th century. A cultural historian, Laqueur likes to come at big and familiar topics from unexpected angles: The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015) analyzes the respectful handling of corpses in order to understand what the dead do for the living. The book before that, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003), puzzles over the taboos that govern the most democratic form of sexual gratification.
Like mortal remains and masturbation, the canine gaze might seem a marginal topic, but it provides a way to appreciate dogs’ centrality in human experience. They are ubiquitous in art. Tens of thousands of them line the walls of museums and galleries. Dogs show up in dog portraiture, of course, and they have a natural place in scenes of hunting and public carousing. Once you start looking for them, you see them in all kinds of paintings—in portraits of princes and ladies, in Bible scenes, pooping on the street in a Rembrandt drawing, leading the way into modernity in an 1876 Gustave Caillebotte painting set in Paris, Le Pont de l’Europe. Mostly what dogs in art do is look, usually at people. They study other figures in a scene or peer out at the viewer. In the book’s frontispiece, Hundehode (“Head of a Dog”), a dog stares at us with disturbing intensity, the urgency of its expression highlighted by patches of electric turquoise around the eyes that clash violently with the reddish-brown of the snout. The painting, by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, is dated 1942, two years into the Nazi occupation of Norway.
Laqueur has a theory about the dog in art: It stands in for the artist. “Dogs like artists do seem to look more intently than the rest of us,” he writes. He tells a story about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was once surprised to hear the painter Paul Cézanne described by a fellow painter as a man who looked at things as a dog would—purely, straightforwardly, “without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive.” The writer W. G. Sebald turned Rilke’s anecdote into a dictum: “Like a dog / Cézanne says / That’s how a painter / Must see.”
Artists use dogs to do what both they and dogs are good at: telling us where to look. A dog steers us toward important information in Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s The Finding of Moses, from the early 1730s. The painting illustrates a scene from the Book of Exodus. Pharaoh’s daughter and her entourage hover excitedly over the infant Moses, who has been pulled out of a basket floating in the Nile; his mother had set him adrift rather than let him be drowned on Pharaoh’s order. The Egyptians are so focused on the baby that they don’t notice the Israelite girl striding toward them from the other side of the painting. We do, though, because their dog looks at her intently, its ears perked up. The young woman is Moses’s sister, Miriam, and she is gesturing toward a wet nurse outside the frame—actually, the wet nurse is Moses’s mother, though Miriam won’t tell the princess that. The dog sees what the Egyptians can’t or won’t because the young woman is a lowly slave.
Scottish National Gallery
The Finding of Moses (early 1730s), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
The dog’s gaze in art doesn’t limit itself to indicating something concrete. It may also alert us to a larger force that we have been blind to. In the case of Munch’s dog, that force is Evil; in Tiepolo’s, it’s God. At this point in the story, Miriam’s role is to make sure that the future leader of the Hebrews ends up in the hands of the princess. But the sharpness of the animal’s gaze suggests another, higher meaning: Miriam is God’s messenger, heralding the imminent liberation of the slaves. Above all, the dog’s line of sight performs a crucial narrative function. It unites the two sides of the painting, and thereby two peoples and two opposing stories—the Egyptians have no idea how tightly their history is about to be tethered to the Hebrews’—into a single tale of redemption.
To see like a dog in a work of art is to have moral perceptions about human beings. A common theme is the dog guiding a blind man. Another is the dog watching out for the beggar. Francisco de Goya’s drawing Blind Beggar With Dog (circa 1824) combines both. In it, a humble beggar holds out his hat, bending in a manner that looks almost like bowing. Goya anchors this lowly man to the ground by means of a walking stick and a dog that lies next to him. Both man and dog seem more like shapes than individuals—the beggar is an undifferentiated bulk, the dog a lumpy mass under fur. The man’s eyes are closed, depriving us of access to his thoughts, and he seems about to sink back into the earth. But the dog’s eyes are open and piercing, providing a center of consciousness and a conscience. It is “looking straight out at us—seeing us for the blind man, demanding that we pay attention to his master,” Laqueur writes.
Above all, the pictorial dog shows compassion. In a fresco in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel that is part of a cycle about the life of the Virgin Mary, the late-medieval painter Giotto endows a dog with a depth of mercy that perhaps prefigures Christ’s. Joachim, the Virgin’s father, has fled into the desert after a painful humiliation. (This episode is found in the First Gospel of James, a second-century apocryphal work.) There he comes upon two shepherds who tend his sheep. Rather than greet their master, the young men look away, eyeing each other as if put off by the anguish on his face. One of their dogs, however, rises up on its hind legs, looks full into Joachim’s eyes, and wags its tail. It is a poignant moment of cross-species recognition; the dog restores the dignity denied by the shepherds’ indifference. “Dogs humanize humans,” Laqueur notes dryly.
But aren’t sympathetic dogs in art just wish fulfillment? It would be easy to read them as products of a narcissistic longing for unconditional love. In our scientific age, we are not supposed to anthropomorphize animals—that is, mistake our culturally overdetermined notions about animals for real knowledge, empirically obtained. But dogs are not as “other” as other animals are, and our thoughts about them spring from a much closer acquaintance. Dogs attach to their human caregivers, just as babies do; they’ve been bred to. Moreover, if we mythologize the dog’s moral imagination, that doesn’t mean that its morality is imaginary. Actual dogs clearly do feel joy and sorrow, and exhibit concern for their humans.
Lucian Freud’s Girl With a White Dog (1951–52) can be taken as a melancholia painting in the tradition of Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I (1514). The main figure in such works is a mournful woman, typically accompanied by a dog. The conventional approach has been to interpret both of them iconographically. The woman represents a dark emotional state understood in medieval and Renaissance times as bound up in genius and madness, while dogs have long been seen as symbols for “spleen and black bile,” in Laqueur’s words. In his view, however, the dog is also just doing what dogs do; it is “keeping a dejected figure company.”
In Freud’s work, a woman sits on a couch and stares bleakly into the middle distance. She wears a loosely draped robe that exposes one untanned breast, and on her thigh lies the heavy head of a white bull terrier, which looks up at us with an inscrutable expression. The textured whiteness of its short-haired coat rhymes with her smooth white breast, pairing their bodies. They are profoundly at ease with each other. Dogs assuage loneliness by being there for us corporeally as well as sociably. Eyes locking with eyes is one step, and limbs sprawling side by side is another.
Tate
Girl With a White Dog (1951–52), Lucian Freud
How many other caring bodies cleave to us so unhesitatingly in our sorrow? And can we always be counted on to cleave back? Some of the greatest paintings in Laqueur’s book depict the misery of the solitary dog. Perhaps the most famous is Goya’s El Perro, in which a dog looks with imploring eyes into an ominous yellow mist. It is one in a series known as the Black Paintings, disturbing murals that the artist painted on his own walls from 1819 to 1823. As Laqueur reports, critics traditionally interpret paintings like these as figurative representations of our own existential isolation.
But I think they also show that dogs may share in that tragedy. I take one of Titian’s greatest paintings, The Death of Actaeon (1559–75), based on Ovid’s version of the Diana and Actaeon myth in his Metamorphoses, as a parable of our entangled fates. Wandering in the woods, the hunter Actaeon has come upon the goddess bathing naked with her nymphs. Furious, she has splashed water on him and turned him into a stag. Ovid heightens Actaeon’s anguish by having him retain his human mind in the animal’s body; he tries to cry out but has lost the power of speech. His own dogs, not recognizing him, tear him apart.
The Death of Actaeon, left unfinished at Titian’s death, depicts the mauling. It is a horror movie in paint, full of reds and streaking brushwork that convey the speed of the rushing hounds and made eerie by the specter of dogs turning on their master. Laqueur calls it “a primal scene of violence as if the evolutionary civilizing process were reversed.”
But, as he observes, the myth of Actaeon poses another question: What about the dogs? They deserve their lot no more than he does his, and surely understand it less. Ovid doesn’t tell us what happens when they realize that Actaeon is gone, but a second-century compilation of myths does. Laqueur quotes it: “When he was no more, they looked for their master with great howls and bays.” A dog is more than man’s friend. The social compact between the species is a two-way love story, rooted in millennia of mutual recognition. Woe unto us and our dogs should we ever stop seeing each other.
This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “What Dogs See.”
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