The Dog’s Gaze by Thomas Laqueur review – the art of the canine, from Velázquez to Picasso

A clever and beautiful survey of dogs in painting, with a brilliant interpretation of their role at its heart Thirty-five thousand years ago, in the Ardèche region of France, Paleolithic artists drew a spectacular bestiary on the walls of the Chauvet cave. Their focus was apex predators, so there were lots of lions, as well as mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. Dogs were nowhere to be seen, and yet in the soft sediment on the limestone floor of the cave, there are traces of canid pawprints next…