VCMurphy

Dogs have been bred over millennia to meet our eyes with their own, offering a gaze of gratitude rather than one of appetite or fear. They are creatures of the nose, above all, olfactory rather than optical in their primary apprehensions. Yet in the course of our coevolution their eyes have come to mimic human eyes so that they would seem to look at us the way we look at them. “Dogs live within a neat symbolic divide. On the one hand, they represent courage, an intrepid readiness to take risks on behalf of their beloved; on the other, they represent loyalty, a refusal to be removed from the presence of their families. The dog in art both walks ahead with the hunters and stays behind with the gatherers,” Adam Gopnik writes. Read about the depth of the relationship between humans and their canine companion, and how that love has been transferred into art: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/lQ…