Briton Rivière

In 1878 the Royal Academy in London hung a small painting of a sulking child on a staircase, chin on the banister, with a devoted dog pressed to her side and sharing the mood. It was called Sympathy, and it became one of the most reproduced pictures of the Victorian age.

Its painter, Briton Rivière, had grown up inside art, since his father was a drawing master, and he made his name doing one thing better than almost anyone: reading human feeling into animals without dressing them up as little people. In his earlier Fidelity of 1869 a poacher and his dog wait together in a bare cell, and the dog's patience carries the whole story. Critics ranked him the natural heir to Edwin Landseer, the great animal painter of the previous generation.

That restraint was the point. His biographer praised him for keeping his dogs as dogs, too sympathetic to turn them into half-taught actors in fancy dress. Rivière exhibited at the Academy for more than fifty years, from boyhood into old age, and died in London in 1920.