Description
This sizeable imposing pottery figure of the Hound of Alcibiades realistically modeled seated on a shaped plinth. The modeling is of the best quality and probably the work of the Enoch Wood Pottery located in Burslem Staffordshire and made at the turn of the 18th century.
NOTES (The Answer Bank). ‘The Dog of Alcibiades’ – also known as the ‘Jennings Dog’ – is a twice-lifesize marble sculpture of a Molossian Hound, the ancestor of modern mastiffs and Rottweilers dating probably from the 2nd century AD – is a Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic Greek bronze original, and is regarded as one the most excellent images of any animal to have survived from the classical world.
The figure is also known as the Jennings dog named after its first modern owner, Henry Constantine Jennings, who acquired the statue and brought it back to England in about 1750 from Rome, where it had been unearthed and restored in the early 18th century. Because the dog has no tail, Jennings believed that it is a representation of the hound owned by Alcibiades, the Athenian general. Jennings was proud of his ownership and commented, ‘A fine dog it was, and a lucky dog was I to purchase it.’ Jennings sold the figure to settle a gambling debt and subsequently acquired by Duncombe’s, a banking family in Yorkshire, in 1816. A descendant of the family offered the hound to the British Museum in the 1980s, who eventually secured it for the nation and where it is displayed today.
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