2026 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction18 / 24 • View Catalog •
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Art critic Charles Wisner Barrell, writing in 1907, said of Edmund H. Osthaus: “The dog has been faithfully and adequately portrayed in literature … Oddly enough, he has found among painters very few truthful delineators. Many artists have essayed to paint dogs occasionally, just as they have turned their hands to cows and sheep and horses, but nearly always they have used the animals as foils for accentuation of human characteristics, or as appropriate figures in landscapes, or they have boldly twisted canine attributes into all but human caricatures.
“Up to the present time, perhaps the only painter who has earnestly and successfully sought to realize this wish by devoting his life to the truthful, unidealized delineation of canine types is the German-American artist of Toledo, Ohio, Edmund H. Osthaus.
“A thorough sportsman himself, Mr. Osthaus has elected to paint various types of hunting-dogs, as he considers them the most intelligent and interesting members of their family. He has sedulously guarded against producing caricatures or humanized ‘still-life’ studies, all of his canvases aiming to picture his models in the full flush and vigor of life – life of which the key-note is abounding vitality, expressing itself in splendid action.
“Beautiful and intelligent his dogs are, but not ideally so. They are so true to type that one seems to recognize in them dogs which he himself has known and loved. This is largely owing to the fact that they are pictured amid natural environment. The artist is wise enough not to force his subjects to assume strange postures in order to attract attention. To depict with vividness and accuracy various phases of the normal upsurge of the dog’s life in his joy and his artist purpose. And owing to his successful achievement in this respect, to Edmund H. Osthaus must be conceded the title of ‘Art-Master of the Dog.’”
PROVENANCE
Carleton Griffin Broer, Perrysburg, Ohio, ca. 1940
Present owner, by descent
