XAVIER BRAY, the charismatic director of The Wallace Collection museum in London, believes “you can tell a lot about someone’s profile photo on WhatsApp”. Having not considered this before, I click on mine; it is of my Italian greyhound cross/whippety thing sneaking a moment at the head of my bed. His is a pug portrait by Goya, a nod to his expertise in Spanish art and his two pugs, Bluebell and Winston, who are familiar sights in his office.
We’re both clearly dog lovers but he has the analytical and sociological mind of someone used to looking at canine and human portraits, hence him spotting that the modern-day version can invariably end up on our phones and on our walls, reflecting our personalities as canine depictions always have done. It is no coincidence that one of the most popular exhibitions The Wallace Collection has ever hosted was ‘Faithful and Fearless: Portraits of Dogs from Gainsborough to Hockney’, held in 2023.
“We had 85,000 visitors, which for The Wallace Collection is big,” he reveals. Compare that with an average of 130,000 visitors for a National Portrait Gallery exhibition and you realise Bray is being understated. “I believe that there is a PhD to be written on the role
