Austrian Cold-Painted Terracotta Model of a Seated Pug Dog With Glass Eyes, Life Size

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Austrian Cold-Painted Terracotta Model of a Seated Pug Dog with Glass Eyes, Life Size
Austria or Bohemia, Circa 1880–1900

Few … Read more Austrian Cold-Painted Terracotta Model of a Seated Pug Dog with Glass Eyes, Life Size
Austria or Bohemia, Circa 1880–1900

Few antique animal figures have as much personality as this one. Standing over sixteen inches tall, this large cold-painted terracotta pug sits back on his haunches with his tail curled around the base and his head turned slightly to the right, watching the room with an alert, expectant look. The inset amber and black glass eyes give the face its life, and the modeler clearly knew the breed: the black mask and wrinkled muzzle, the cropped ears painted black in the nineteenth-century fashion, the tip of a red tongue at the corners of the mouth, a beauty spot on the left cheek, and the loose folds of the chest painted a soft grey-white against the fawn coat. Around his neck is a molded, red-painted studded leather collar with a buckle.

The figure is hollow press-molded, with an open base and a round vent hole and the buff terracotta body showing at the paw edges, and the paint is applied cold rather than fired, all characteristic of the Austrian and Bohemian workshops that made these portrait-like dogs in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Most examples are much smaller; at this scale he is essentially life size for the breed and among the largest made.

He is a natural for a library or study, seated on the floor beside a fireplace or club chair, or on a low bookcase or console table in an entrance hall where he can greet visitors. The fawn and black palette and the soft, hand-painted finish sit as comfortably with English country and traditional rooms as with a more eclectic, collected interior, and he brings warmth and a touch of humor wherever he lands.

Dimensions
Height: 16¼ inches (41.3 cm)
Width: 14½ inches (36.8 cm)
Depth: 8 inches (20.3 cm)

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good, with scattered losses to the cold paint at the paw edges and base rim, as usual with unfired decoration.

Historical Context
The seated pug is one of the longest-lived models in European ceramics, descending from J. J. Kändler’s Meissen porcelain pugs of the 1740s, whose popularity spread across Europe with the Mops-Orden, the “Order of the Pug,” the para-Masonic society that adopted the breed as its emblem of loyalty. In the second half of the nineteenth century the model was revived at life size in cold-painted terracotta by workshops in Austria and Bohemia, then a single empire, among them Johann Maresch of Aussig and Bernard Bloch of Eichwald, whose marked wares define the class; most examples, like this one, left the factory unmarked. The cropped ears follow the fashion in the breed itself, abandoned in England after the Prince of Wales spoke against the practice in 1895, and give these dogs their characteristically alert, rounded head.

(Ref: NY11241-lrrx) See less