It is tempting to file minimalist pet portraits under “pandemic décor,” a clean line drawing of your dog that pairs nicely with a mid-century sofa and a houseplant. That is how the category gets marketed and how most people first encounter it. But spend any time with the people actually making this work and a different story surfaces, one that is far less about interior design and far more about memory. The studio Animalist will tell you outright: the most powerful thing their art does is help someone hold onto a pet who is no longer here. The clean aesthetic is the surface. The engine underneath is grief, and grief is not a trend.
The very old impulse a modern studio is serving
Commissioning a portrait of a beloved animal is not new. People have been memorializing their companions in paint and sculpture for centuries, dogs at their owners’ feet in Renaissance portraits, horses immortalized by stable owners, cats rendered with near-religious care in earlier civilizations still. The impulse to make a lasting image of an animal you love, so that the love outlasts the animal, is one of the more enduring threads in art. What has changed is access. You no longer need to commission an oil painter and sit for weeks. You can upload a photo and receive a piece designed around your specific pet’s breed and features. The technology is new. The need it answers is ancient.
That is the reframe worth carrying into any conversation about “pet wall art.” It is not a novelty product that happened to catch on. It is the latest, most accessible form of something humans have always done, and the studios doing it well understand they are in the memory business, not the poster business.
How Animalist started: one Staffy named Peanut
Animalist’s own origin makes the point. The studio did not begin with a market analysis; it began with a single dog. Co-founder Emil, a graphic designer, adopted a little Staffordshire named Peanut, and she became the obsession that filled his home with art. “People would keep saying, ‘You need to create more of these for other breeds.’ So we did,” says co-founder Jan van Helleputte. The studio launched in 2018, originally under the name “Dogmade.” They renamed it Animalist when they wanted to include cats, and to leave room to go further: “Maybe one day we’ll go beyond dogs and cats.”
The catalog grew the way a memory project grows, one breed at a time. They started with around 40 dog breeds and now offer designs for over 200, cats included. That breadth matters more than it sounds, because the whole emotional payload of a pet portrait depends on it actually looking like your pet. A generic dog shape on the wall is décor. A piece that captures your specific breed, build, and bearing is a likeness, and a likeness is what people grieve and treasure.
The pandemic accelerated it, but didn’t create it
There is no denying the timing helped. “We definitely noticed an uptick in sales during the pandemic,” van Helleputte says. “Spending more time at home appears to have brought many people closer to their pets and made them realize how much they mean to us. It sure did for us anyway.” Lockdown turned a lot of people into people who stared at their dog all day and concluded they wanted that face on the wall.
But read that carefully and the pandemic is an accelerant, not a cause. It deepened the bond people already had and gave them time to act on a wish that was always there. The market did not invent the desire to honor a pet. It met a desire that surges whenever people are reminded how much these animals mean to them, and a global stay-at-home order was a very large reminder.
The feedback that gives the whole thing away
If you want proof that this is about memory rather than minimalism, listen to which messages move the makers most. Not the ones about how well a print matches the throw pillows. “The most heart-warming feedback we get is from people who describe how their print helps them remember their late pet,” van Helleputte says. “We’ve had tears in our eyes on numerous occasions reading these messages.” That is the tell. A décor company is gratified by a styled room. A memory company is undone by a customer saying the piece helps them carry a dog who is gone. Animalist is plainly the second kind of company, whatever the aesthetic on the website suggests.
What this means if you’re considering one
The practical upshot is simple but useful. If you are thinking about a pet portrait, the question is not really “does this match my walls.” It is “does this capture my animal,” because the value of the piece, and whether it will still mean something to you in ten years, rests entirely on the likeness. Look for studios with deep, breed-specific catalogs rather than a single generic silhouette, and treat the purchase the way you would any keepsake: chosen for accuracy and meaning first, and styling second.
Van Helleputte sees the bigger shift as a feature of the age we live in. “The world has changed so much over the past 20 years. Today, one can come up with the craziest idea, like customized art for pet owners, put it out there, and reach people across the planet. It’s truly incredible.” What is genuinely incredible, though, is not that the idea exists. It is that an impulse as old as art, keeping the ones we love close after they leave, can now be served from a studio in Sweden to a wall anywhere on earth.
References
- Animalist. “About.” https://animalist.art/
