Sit! | Pluto, by Lucian Freud, at Browse and Darby

LUCIAN FREUD,1922-2011. Pluto, 1988, signed with initials in pencil, numbered and dedicated 1/ for J.K. (a proof aside from the edition of 40 plus ten artist's proofs), published by James Kirkman, London, and Brooke Alexander, New York. Etching with hand-colouring in watercolour, on wove paper, plate: 32.4 x 60.7 cm, sheet: 42 x 68.5 cm. Courtesy of Browse & Darby

One of the great loves of Lucian Freud’s life was his dog Pluto, a bitch whippet who he named after the Greek God of the Underworld.

His lover and frequent sitter Susanna Chancellor, wife of the Spectator editor Alexander Chancellor, introduced him to whippets (she had two) and Freud originally bought Pluto for his daughter Bella, before adopting her for himself.

He found Pluto to be a great sleeper, and thus an exemplary sitter. He also appreciated the fact that, as a whippet, she wasn’t over affectionate, like lesser breeds. ‘The only thing I don’t like about [dogs],’ he once said, ‘is what’s called doglike devotion.’

It is Susanna Chancellor’s reclining figure behind the animal in the above etching, made by Freud in 1988, when Pluto was still a puppy. It has recently been revealed, in the 2023 catalogue raisonné of Freud’s prints, that the etching was originally bigger, and included Chancellor’s head, but was later cropped. It is unclear whether this was for sentimental or compositional reasons (their relationship was complex) 

In the catalogue of Freud’s 2002 Tate Modern retrospective, his biographer (and the show’s curator) William Feaver wrote that the artist loved dogs’ ‘lack of arrogance, their ready eagerness, their animal pragmatism.’ He quotes Freud as saying ‘I’m really interested in people as animals. Part of my liking to work with them naked is for that reason. I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto, my whippet’.

Interestingly, Susanna Chancellor never let Freud paint her nude.

Pluto was present in Freud’s studio from 1988 to her death in 2003, his most prolific period, and was frequently painted by the artist, with and without human companions. Freud also produced a cartoon of Pluto’s head as the logo for Bella’s fashion label: Courtney Love, Kate Moss, Madonna and Sophie Dahl have all been photographed in Pluto t-shirts.

Freud marked Pluto’s death with an oil painting of her grave. He had given his assistant David Dawson a whippet as a present, and this dog, a great great niece of Pluto, called Eli, became his new studio companion. Freud’s last, unfinished, painting was a nude of Dawson, alongside Eli, tellingly named Portrait of a Hound.

You can see Freud’s 1988 etching of Pluto in the current exhibition at London gallery Browse & Darby, among works by artists such as Walter Sickert, William Nicholson and Euan Uglow. The show continues until January 24, but please note that Browse & Darby will be closed between December 22 and January 8.