Boy Playing with a Dog

In the 1820s Florence had a large English colony, and its sculptors' studios lived partly on English orders. Around 1827 an English collector asked Pampaloni for this group of a small boy playing with a dog.

The idea was an old one. Ancient sculpture had shown Cupid stroking a faithful dog, a pairing of love and loyalty. Pampaloni kept the game and left out the god, so the child is an ordinary boy, round-limbed and curly-haired, with a knowing smile, and the dog's thick coat is worked strand by strand. When the plaster was shown at the Florentine Academy, critics praised its "gentleness, truth and expression". The marble version is today in a private collection in Edinburgh.