A dog attributed to Guercino pops up in England. It will go up for auction on March 7

British auction house Cheffins’ Fine Art announced today the discovery of a painting depicting a beige-coated Corsican dog with a mountainous landscape in the background: experts at Cheffins’ have attributed it to Guercino (Cento, 1591 - Bologna, 1666). It would be, in the case, an extremely rare painting of a single animal by the great Emilian master. The work has been in a Suffolk country residence for 167 years and until now had remained unknown to scholars. It will go up for auction March 7 at Cheffins’.

“The attribution to Guercino,” said Sarah Flynn, head of Cheffins’ painting section, "is supported by Nicholas Turner, an authority on the artist’s work, John Somerville, senior curator of the Lobkwicz Collection in Prague, and Francesco Petrucci, who requested the painting for the exhibition Posing Dogs scheduled to be held in Turin in 2018. The style suggests a transitional period in the painter’s career, roughly between 1625 and 1630. Although Guercino often included dogs in portraits and other compositions, there is only one other painting of this type, the famous Portrait of the Aldrovandi Dog preserved at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California."

“The personality of this dog,” said instead scholar Nicholas Turner, “is observed and rendered so beautifully as to suggest that this was the artist’s own dog, or at least a dog that Guercino admired, was attached to, and was evidently fond of. With this detail in mind, the painting would therefore be assigned to the portrait genre much more than the Aldrovandi Dog.”

The Aldrovandi Dog passed at auction in the 1970s and at the time was considered Guercino’s only animal portrait: the discovery of Cheffins’ dog would mean an important addition to the catalog. The animal, according to the Kennel Club of Great Britain and the Ente Nazionale della Cinofilia Italiana, would, as anticipated, be a Corsican dog, an ancient breed known since Roman times for its robust physique, strength and endurance.

Pictured is the newly discovered painting

A dog attributed to Guercino pops up in England. It will go up for auction on March 7

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