Matisse, Bonnard, Titian

On Monday I posted about a rhyme between a William Cope Civil War genre painting and a Marsden Hartley painting about his lover Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in World War I. Today, also from the Art Institute of Chicago, a less linear rhyme.

I've been paying extra attention to painterly portrayals of the Danae myth of late, so I was looking forward to seeing the Titian on loan to the AIC. (The painting is owned by the Barker Welfare Foundation.) Titian painted a bunch of Danaes (Naples, Prado) and they're all a little different. One of the distinguishing features of the Chicago Titian is a little dog curled in the lower left hand corner of the painting. I've read many versions of the Danae myth and in no account does her father, King Acrisius, leave her locked up in a tower with her pet dog. The usual art historical reading of Titian's pooch is that it signifies loyalty or fidelity, though I'm stumped as to whom or what young Danae was being loyal.

Fast forward a few hundred years to Matisse's marvelous Interior with Dog at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Here the dog is just being a dog. (And, most probably, a compositional element.) The dog is napping in much the same pose as the Titan pooch, but it's hard to think that there's much connection between the Matisse and the Chicago Titian.

But then I started thinking about one of Bonnard's remarkable paintings of his wife, specifically the brilliant canvas in the Carnegie's collection. The Carnegie painting features Marthe in the bath, a familiar Bonnardian set-up. In front of Marthe, right in the center of the foreground, is a curled up little dog. Odd: Bonnard generally hid pets (cats mostly) at the periphery of his paintings, using them to create movement or action. The dog in this Bonnard is right there in the middle of the painting. And oh, one more thing: Marthe passed away in 1942. Bonnard finished this particular painting in 1946. The Marthe in the bathtub is long dead.

I dig the little dog in that painting, but he's always puzzled me. A classic art historical view of the painting would probably be that the dog symbolizes Bonnard's fidelity to his late and, uh, floating wife. (He and Marthe had an odd relationship: Bonnard was by no means faithful during their marriage -- his mistress eventually committed suicide -- and Marthe was a reclusive, probably depressed, hypochondriac. But by most accounts Bonnard was devoted to Marthe even though he painted her and his mistress in opposition, and even though his nudes of his wife in the boudoir show her to be strangely out of reach due to numerous strange barriers such as chairs, screens and the like.)

So that dog in the foreground. One frequent art historical guess is that Bonnard took it from his friend Matisse. Maybe. And maybe he took it from Titian -- Bonnard's pooch is just as weird as Danae's, but for different reasons. Or maybe, compositionally, Bonnard just liked it there. Who knows. But it made me think of three wonderful paintings and that's fine too.