Since Leonard Nimoy died today, I wanted to post a photo of him with his dachshund. The only info I could find about it was this by Leonard: "I was raised in a tenement neighborhood, where you couldn't have a dog. The first time I bought a house, I bought a dog."
The sequence starts on April 19, 1957, the day that Lump met Picasso. Mr. Duncan, who had first photographed Picasso a year earlier, brought Lump along for the ride, largely because the dog did not get along well with Mr. Duncan’s other pet, an Afghan hound called Kublai Khan.
“Lump immediately decided that this would be his new home,” Mr. Duncan recalled in an interview on a visit to Paris, noting pointedly that “lump” means “rascal” in German. “He more or less said, ‘Duncan, that’s it, I’m staying here.’ And he did, for the next six years.”
Picasso was apparently equally entranced. That very day, he did his first portrait of Lump, a signed and dated portrait of the dog that he painted on a plate while having lunch with Jacqueline Roque, his new partner, whom he would marry four years later.
(via The New York Times)
"From September 1993, I painted and drew my dogs. This took a certain amount of planning, since dogs are generally not interested in Art (I say generally only because I have now come across a singing dog). Food and love dominate their lives.
"I make no apologies for the apparent subject matter. These two dear little creatures are my friends. They are intelligent, loving, comical, and often bored. They watch me work; I notice the warm shapes they make together, their sadness and their delights. And, being Hollywood dogs, they somehow seem to know that a picture is being made."
-David Hockney, from his book David Hockney Dog Days.
