Mia — a Yorkshire Terrier pet portrait in the court manner · Commission No. 0006

Mia is a Yorkshire Terrier, and No. 0006 is the entry where the archetype chose itself for reasons of scale rather than character.

The archetype

Most of the classical portrait forms are built for large sitters. The grandee, the duke, the marshal, the admiral — every one of them assumes a subject with mass, and every one of them makes a small animal look like a small animal that has been given something too big for it. That is the failure mode of this entire category, and it is why so much of it ends up looking like a costume shop.

The infanta is the exception. It is the one court role that was actually written for a small sitter, and the whole visual language of it — the wide skirt, the low horizon, the deliberate absence of anyone taller in the frame — exists to make a small figure the largest thing in a room. It does not scale a terrier up. It builds the room down around her.

The bow is hers, from the photograph. It came with the dog. Everything else came with the commission.

The specification

Commission

No. 0006

Sitter

Mia, Yorkshire Terrier

Archetype

The Infanta, in the court manner

Edition

The Portrait, 40 × 50 cm

Medium

Giclée on 400gsm museum canvas, stretched by hand

Finished in

Europe

The close

She was approved before printing and entered at No. 0006, and she followed Tomy to the press on the same day. Two commissions, two sitters from outside the house, consecutive numbers. The ledger stopped being a private record that week.