VALENTINE THOMAS GARLAND
Winchester c.1840 - 1914
Ref: CD 210
Cosy and comfy
Signed lower right: Valentine T Garland
Oil on panel: 8 x 10 in / 20.3 x 25.4 cm
Frame size: 20 x 15 ½ in / 50.8 x 39.4 cm
Provenance:
T Richardson & Co., London
Private collection, UK
Richard Green, London, 1993;
private collection, USA, 1996
These charming puppies are a litter of Jack Russell terriers. The Jack Russell is a kind of fox terrier. The breed was named for the Reverend John Russell of Barnstaple. He joined the Kennel Club in 1873 and remained a member until his death in 1883. He is thought to have been the oldest fox terrier breeder in England. He started breeding the particular strain of the fox terrier breed which is named for him when he was eighteen. The bitch with which Russell began the breed was named Trump and was acquired from Russell's milkman. As Rev E W L Davis describes in his biography of Russell, the young Oxford undergraduate was out walking in 1819 when, “a milkman met him with a terrrier - such an animal as Russell had only yet seen in his dreams, he halted, as Actaeon might have done when he caught sight of Diana disporting in her bath; but unlike the ill-fated hunter, he never budged from the spot till he had won the prize and secured it for his own.” [Rev E W L Davis, A Memoir of the Rev John Russell, London, 1862]. The Rev John Russell bequeathed his portrait of Trump to the Prince and Princess of Wales with whom he had a close friendship, and it has hung in Sandringham ever since.
Valentine Thomas Garland was a popular genre painter in Victorian England. He couples an accuracy in his rendering of particular dog breeds with a sense of human sentiment. His small cabinet scale paintings were enormously popular and suited the conventions of Victorian decoration. He exhibited from 1884 at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street. He was a native of Winchester.
