Sally Muir did not set out to become the painter of dogs. She used to paint children, and every so often a client would ask her to slip the family dog into the frame. She kept saying yes, kept getting asked, and somewhere in there realized the dog was the part she loved most. What began as an accident has become a body of work that does something sneaky and lovely: it takes the animals most people scroll past, the old ones, the shelter ones, the awkward ones, and insists that they are worth looking at closely.
The habit came first. About a decade ago, Muir started a Facebook page, “A Dog A Day,” built on a plain rule: post one piece of canine art daily. Watercolors, oils, charcoal, pencil, the medium changed but the promise held. The page took off and is still going, and it grew into her first book, A Dog A Day, in 2017, a sprawl of breeds, sizes, and personalities held together by her belief that every dog, like every person, is its own specific creature.
No formula, on purpose
Ask how she captures a particular dog and the answer is deliberately unhelpful: it depends on the dog. Sometimes it’s the expression, sometimes the set of the head or the angle of the ears, sometimes the way the animal stands. She resists having a system, because a system would flatten exactly the individuality she’s chasing. Her style, loose and experimental over what she’d call a solid foundation of drawing, owes something to Hans Holbein the Younger and to the American painter Alice Neel, and it reads as affectionate without tipping into cute.
The old dogs
One of her muses was an aging Whippet named Lily, who inspired her 2021 collection Old Dogs, a series of sketches and paintings devoted to senior dogs. Muir is drawn to what age does to a dog’s face, the gray eyebrows, the milky eyes, and to the particular tenderness of caring for an animal near the end of its life. She sees the paintings partly as a way to keep something, and she’s found that owners feel the same. One person, she has recalled, used to sit at meals beside the portrait of a dog they’d just lost, a habit she found touching in a way that stuck with her.
That appreciation is not abstract for her. When Lily entered her final months, Muir drew her almost daily, a way of holding on and of watching closely at the same time. The grief and the work were the same act.
Rescue Dogs, and the argument underneath
Her collection Rescue Dogs narrowed the focus further. Moved by the several rescue dogs she’s lived with, Muir asked, across social media, for other adopted dogs she could paint, but this time the goal went past capturing a look. Each portrait comes paired with a short account of the dog’s journey, how it was surrendered or found, and how it landed somewhere loved. The point she’s after is simple and quietly persuasive: a rough beginning does not condemn an animal to a rough life. She loves that these once-unwanted dogs are now cherished, and she hopes the work nudges people toward considering a rescue of their own.
Rescue Dogs leans heavily on Sighthounds, a group close to Muir’s heart and, sadly, one that fills shelters. She finds them gentle and noble and a little heartbreaking, and she’s clear-eyed that they’re among the breeds most often mistreated, from racing Greyhounds to the Galgos of Spain. Turning the spotlight on them is part of the job as she sees it.
For all the range in her subjects, Muir keeps landing in the same place. The dogs are not her material so much as her reason. They are, in her telling, the whole inspiration.
What’s new
Muir’s dog work has continued to build in the years since Rescue Dogs, and her “A Dog A Day” project remains active, so there’s a steady stream of new portraits and prints to find. The cause the book points at hasn’t gone away either: sighthound rescue, especially of retired racing Greyhounds and Spanish Galgos, is still an active effort, and adoption groups devoted to those breeds are the most direct way to act on the feeling one of her portraits gives you.
References
- Muir, Sally. A Dog A Day. Pavilion Books, 2017.
- Muir, Sally. Old Dogs. Pavilion Books, 2021.
- Muir, Sally. Rescue Dogs. Pavilion Books, 2023.
