Van Eyck

Inspiring, educational, moving, sometimes distressing, this is a riveting visual history of man’s best friend. Thomas Laqueur, from a German Jewish family, whose mother owned boxers, introduces us to many hitherto unexplored facts. Who knew that in 1938 guard dogs, using Bedouin herding dogs, were specially bred for ‘the new Zion’? Or that Darwin thought that dogs have a conscience?   We are encouraged to scrutinise master- pieces of art with a fresh eye. In ‘The Wedding at Cana’ (1563), Paolo Veronese includes one white dog, who is ‘looking up at Jesus’s white shining face and invites us to join it’. Five dogs feature in this painting, and I took some time to spot each.

Walter Neurath, refugee from Nazism, public educator and the founder of Thames & Hudson, would have loved this book. In Lachlan Goudie the publisher has found a born guide, a painter himself and the son of a painter, perfectly equipped to explain how artists have created their masterpieces, from the cave paintings of Chauvet to the machine-learned extravaganzas of AI. Some ten years ago Goudie’s television series The Story of Scottish Art introduced viewers to a similarly broad sweep of art history, and if this book doesn’t make it to the screen then it ought to. Here, too, Goudie uses his own practice to convey the dilemmas and difficulties that artists of every era have confronted in the mastery of their materials.