In Defense of Pet Portraiture as a Worthy Art Form
Morgan Day | Literary Hub | 24th March 2026
A polemic. Confession – your editor is neither a dog person nor even a pet person. Many others are. Apart from the horse portraitist George Stubbs, few artists focus on animals. Dogs are part of a “larger system” and creatures we should be “thinking with”. So why think of pet portraiture as “low art”? It is a way to study interspecies relations, something we should do to better understand the “more-than-human” world. Our concept of the “environment” is “bloodless, flat-footed”. Pet portraiture is the opposite.