The Dandie Dinmont family

Exhibited in Manchester in 1848, as The Dandie Dinmont Family – the property of David Laing Esq, the painting is probably the earliest known exhibited picture of the breed. It took its name from the jolly farmer, Dandie Dinmont, a character from Sir Walter Scott’s novel of 1815, Guy Mannering. The novel was highly successful and Dandie Dinmont’s terriers, as described by Scott, were soon extremely popular and began to be associated with the name of the farmer themselves. Today’s Dandie Dinmont is a shorter-legged, longer-backed and more ‘top-knotted’ version of what we are looking at in this present picture. However, this later, standardised form of the breed seems only to have been arrived at around the time of the founding of the kennel club in 1876.

Henry Calvert was the best known of a family of painters from Darlton in Nottinghamshire. Calvert devoted himself to animal painting and he is best known today for fine views of the English sporting scene. His paintings would vary from studies of an individual horse and rider to large panoramic views of an entire hunting field. He was also a close observer of other animals, sending two big cat pictures to the R.A. in 1853 and a number of prize cattle pictures to Manchester.