Like many of their generation in the south, Tonya and Larry Smith, both 69, commissioned oil paintings depicting each of their six grandchildren, the girls wearing frilly dresses, the boys in slacks. But only one portrait currently hangs in their Valdosta, Georgia, home and its subject is naked.
“It’s so strange, because I never would have done this in the past. I don’t know what prompted us, but we did it,” Tonya Smith said of the painting she commissioned of their King Charles Spaniel, Rusty, who passed away in November.
Humans have long depicted animals in art: The horses, stags and aurochs of Lascaux Cave date back 17,000 years. But the transition from animal as subject to pet as subject — not just a cat but rather my cat — is more recent, said Dr. Julie Aronson, curator at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Starting with a few artists depicting pets in the 17th century, by the 19th century “there’s a greater emphasis on companion animals,” she said.
Queen Victoria commissioned hundreds of lithographs, paintings and enamel miniatures of her dogs. And artists like George Stubbs built careers painting people’s horses. But today’s pet portraiture engages not just members of the economic and art world elite, but everyday people honoring their own Fidos and Fluffys.
‘I Don’t Have Art of My Relatives’
There is no hard data on the number of people commissioning portraits of their pets, but Google trend data from the last 10 years show a steadily growing interest. (Searches for “custom pet portrait” alone were up 90% over the period.) And portrait societies in both the United States and England confirm they’ve seen more of their members branching out into the discipline.
Why so many people are now hanging paintings, prints and illustrations depicting their pets speaks to the changing relationship between humans and their animals.
Maitri Mody, a content creator based in Portland, Maine, paid for chemotherapy for her 13-year-old pug, Ari, who was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. A few decades ago, that may have been unthinkable but, globally, pet owners have taken to treating animals more like humans, investing not only in their medical care but also grooming, supplements and entertainment.
Mody has ample pictures of loved ones in her phone and in photo albums, but it is Ari who she elevated into decor. “I don’t have art of my relatives,” Mody said, but for her, Ari is family. Through a painful divorce, career changes and multiple geographic moves, “he’s been my rock,” she said. “He’s brought me so much joy and stability over the years.”
Several prints and drawings of Ari hang from her walls, interspersed with pieces from her travels. “I like to make it whimsical, but not just a wall of pug art,” she said.
In San Francisco, Kelsey Rudy, a 36-year-old accountant, has taken a similar approach. She recently commissioned a mixed-media painting of her new dog, Bodie, from artist Andrea Cáceres. A print of her late dog, Yoda, that she received as a gift, hangs on another wall. She has also hung a “tiny, tiny” picture of herself and her boyfriend. “The dogs take up a lot more square footage,” she said.
A Painter’s Dream Job
For a working artist, pet portraiture can make for a reliable career in a way that other art forms cannot. Ben Lenovitz stumbled upon his pet portrait career: He’d been invited to an art fair in Osaka where he was supposed to paint New York landmarks onto cardboard. “Then this older woman had a printout of a photo of her cat and she just showed me the cat, and she’s like, ‘This is my best friend. Can you paint it?’” he said. “It was such a positive experience.”
When he came back to New York, he offered a donation-based pet portrait session at the home decor store Fish’s Eddy, where he has since become the resident artist every weekend. “I did like 30 paintings that day and I had more money than I’ve ever had in my pocket,” he said.
With human portraiture, someone may commission a painting of their spouse, or child, or grandchild just once. But, said Anthony Barham, a painter in Middleburg, Virginia, “The pets kind of die regularly,” so some customers end up returning for several commissions over the years.
And while human portraiture presents an obvious legacy value, pet portraits could have better resale value, said Barham: “I have some clients and collectors who have vast quantities of old paintings of dogs and cats and things, just because it’s a dog or a cat,” he said. “You wouldn’t put someone’s grandmother up there.”
Still, while more people may be hanging images of their pets, some traditional portrait authorities assert that humans remain the more prestigious subject. Members of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters are reluctant to take on pet portrait commissions, despite the growing interest, said Anthony Connolly, the group’s president. “I think the portrait painters have a kind of self-regard, if you like, that it would be slightly beneath them to do pets,” he said.
Jennifer Gennari experienced a similar attitude while studying painting at the Florence Academy of Art. “Painting animals or having an interest in doing anything with animals was not something people were interested in. It was almost like less than doing still life,” she said. “It really suppressed my interest in doing anything with animals.” Now Gennari lists several celebrities among her pet portrait commissioners and charges between a few hundred dollars to $20,000, depending on the scope of the piece.
Artists acknowledge that pet portraits can be a more accessible genre to break into. “The problem with portraits of people is everyone has a different view of what someone looks like and there’s a lot of ego involved. So it’s really a minefield,” Barham said. “Whereas a pet, generally everyone has the same view of the pet.”
Perhaps inevitably, a rising interest in pet portraits has coincided with a rise in online pet portrait generating companies. For as little as $29, you can upload a photo of your pet onto any number of sites. At Paw & Glory they will put your cat into an admiral’s jacket. At Pawbel you can get your dog’s face embroidered onto a hoodie, T-shirt or tote.
Reed Lalor, co-founder of Mod Paws, said many of his customers commission digital pet portraits as gifts — of the roughly 20,000 portraits they sell each year, about 10,000 are purchased between November and December. “Especially during the busy season, we’re hiring up to probably 50 people,” Lalor said, most of them based in the Philippines and churning out at least one portrait an hour. The artists use Adobe InDesign to build portraits from the photos customers upload to the site, with prices ranging from $25 for a digital file of one pet to $118 for three pets depicted in a 16-by-12-inch print.
Poignant Mementos
Tonya and Larry Smith reached out to artist Erica Eriksdotter when they learned Rusty had cancer. A specialist in commemorative acrylic paintings, Eriksdotter had a yearlong waitlist, but the Smiths were willing to wait while Rusty underwent chemotherapy.
They finally received the portrait from their framer the same day Rusty died. “For the longest time I thought, ‘I just don’t really know if I can look at it every day,’” Tonya Smith said. “We didn’t hang it right away.” But now, she said, “It’s just a joy to be able to see it and remember him.”
Beyond her portraits, Mody also has a tattoo of Ari on her wrist, and a custom coffee table in his likeness.
Her favorite piece is a painting by Sally Muir, painted live at a session in an Anthropologie store in London.
Ari died a few days before this story published, and Mody is grateful to have the painting. “Every time I look at it, it reminds me of that day, when he was 3 years old, and we were in London,” Mody said. “It’s one of my most beautiful memories.”
