Artwork story
About Dogs and Still Life
The artist and artwork
Pierre Charles Canot's Dogs and Still Life was published in 1778 as an etching and engraving. The image was not the work of one hand: Canot translated a painting by Charles Jervas through an intermediary drawing by Joseph Farington, and London print publisher John Boydell issued the finished plate. Canot was born in Paris but worked in England. The Met's layered credit makes this a useful example of reproductive printmaking, in which painter, draftsman, engraver, and publisher together carried a private painting into a form that could circulate.
The world around it
The print belongs to Boydell's Houghton Gallery series, named for the Norfolk country house built for Robert Walpole and his celebrated painting collection. A surviving 1775 Boydell letter records engravers preparing plates for the project. The plate appeared while Britain fought its American colonies and France entered the conflict; at home, a mature London print trade was turning art into reproducible culture. In 1779, the year after this plate appeared, Walpole's grandson sold more than two hundred Houghton paintings to Catherine the Great, making Boydell's printed translations important records of a collection about to be dispersed.
A detail to notice
A spaniel-like dog crouches toward a bristling cat at lower right while a second dog peers from behind; dead game fills the floor and hangs heavily above them. Canot varies the engraved lines to separate curling fur, feathers, taut muscle, shadow, and drapery without color. The printed caption does more than name the subject: it says the painting hung in the Dressing Room at Houghton, gives the original picture's dimensions, and dates Boydell's publication to March 2, 1778. That room label turns a tense animal encounter into a portable map of where the lost or dispersed painting once belonged.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is print made in Etching and engraving and held in the Drawings and Prints department.
Recorded dimensions include Sheet (trimmed): 8 11/16 × 9 15/16 in. (22 × 25.3 cm).
Subject terms include Birds, Cats, Deer, Dogs, Still Life, and Coat of Arms. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Rogers Fund, 1962.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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