a dog watches

Gift of Arnold Whitcomb Morse in memory of his parents Guilford Alden and Isabel Barton Morse
collections.artsmia.org (PD)
A little boy, wearing the dress-like children's clothing of the time (c. 1835), listens to a ticking watch.  The family dog watches over him with an alert expression, or at least that's what I think he was meant to do; in a larger view you can see that he actually seems to be behind the boy, and so he's actually looking offstage.  It's all part of the charm of this simply fashioned oil portrait by Samuel Miller of Boston, about whom there's not much available.  In its flatness, the portrait also takes on a certain timelessness, which becomes more poignant when we learn that the act of listening to the watch likely indicates this as a posthumous portrait (see the painting's page at the Minneapolis Institute of Art).  The same bright yellow picks out the watch, its chain, and the dog's collar.  Did Miller mean us to contrast how quickly time flies with the patient devotion of the dog? 

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