BY GEORGES JACOB, CIRCA 1775

Georges Jacob, maître in 1765.

The eighteenth century saw an emergence in the fashion of keeping small animals as domestic pets. Exotic birds and monkeys imported from the Indies were equally popular as small lapdogs, which were often considered faithful companions of ladies of high society. These dogs were kept both for personal companionship and as chic accessories. This sentiment is best expressed by Louis-Sébastien Mercier: Never a woman will be a Cartesian: never will she agree to believe that her little dog is neither sensitive nor reasonable when he caresses her. She would stare down Descartes in person, if he dared to hold him to a similar language; only the fidelity of her dog is better, according to her, than the reason of all men together. I have seen a beautiful woman seriously annoyed and shut the door on a man who had adopted this ridiculous and impertinent opinion. How could one refuse the sensitivity of animals? (Tableau de Paris, 1782, vol. 3, pp. 134-135). Numerous pictures from this time depict dogs as symbols of fidelity. Jean-Honoré Fragonard painted numerous scenes with small dogs, including 'The Love Letter', 'The Shirt Withdrawn' and 'Young Woman playing with a Dog'.

To accommodate these small lapdogs, richly decorated and upholstered niches à chien became fashionable additions to upscale domestic female interiors. In fact, Madame de Pompadour, the epitome of eighteenth-century sophistication, is known to have had such niches à chien in her apartments at the Château de Saint-Hubert in 1762: Une niche en tabouret, pour 2 chiens. For contemporaneous works showing dog kennels see Sigmund Freudenberger’s La Soirée d'Hyver and Jean-Jacques Bachelier’s Dog of the Havana Breed. Often, kennels were fitted with cushions atop to form tabourets, which were to be used by the dog – or even its master. For a pair of similarly outfitted niches à chien en tabouret by Etienne Nauroy from the collection of Mrs. Jayne Wrightsman, see Sotheby’s, New York, 28 April 2010, lot 212 ($86,500).