When Jessica Poundstone set out to publish a book on dog art in museums worldwide, she managed to “visit” 27 museums from New York to Vienna, curate more than 100 pieces of art, and accumulate some surprising bits of trivia ranging from “sporting” competitions to secret societies – all in only two years.

This month, Poundstone debuts her book Museum of Dogs: A Romp Through Art History for Dog People in readings from Portland to New York to the Oregon Coast. She’ll share the unusual path that led her to canine art as old as the bronze age and the not-so-surprising realization that dogs have been inspiring art for pretty much as long as people have been inspired. She will be at Powell’s Books in Portland on May 10, Cloud and Leaf Bookstore in Manzanita on May 14, and A Sometimes Gallery in Portland on June 7.

Poundstone, a Portland-based abstract artist and dog lover, didn’t initially set out to publish a book about dog art. She was searching New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for ideas for another project when, on a whim, she entered the word “dog” in the museum website search bar.

“The results were full of freaking treasures,” Poundstone recalled. “Just stuff I had never seen and never would have expected to see. That was the beginning of this obsession to find more.” Likewise, it was the beginning of the idea that all this art could be a book. Unlike the days, not so long ago, when an author might have had to make the rounds worldwide, Poundstone’s subjects were a tap on the keyboard away.

“Some museums are really making it easy for visitors to their websites to use the images in their collections however you want to,” she said. At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for example, she found that most of what she was looking for was available through public domain or open access. “It really feels like the democratization of a lot of these treasures that really kind of belong to the world to begin with. Museums are facilitating more and more people having access and thinking about them as … having an ownership of those things, or at least having access to them in a new way.”

Poundstone’s criteria for what to include in the book was her “personal sense of which dogs belonged in this particular pack.”  While other books on dog art are often focused on a specific subject, such as paintings of hunting dogs, and tend toward an academic tone, that wasn’t what Poundstone was after. “I wanted something that was the opposite of that, dogs that would blow our minds, touch our hearts, and tickle our funny bones.”

The French Bulldog with an underbite and wearing a flowered nightshirt that graces the book’s cover was clearly meant to be part of Poundstone’s pack. The surprise came when she looked up information on the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum website about the glazed earthenware Figure of a Dog, and discovered it was by French artist and designer Émile Gallé.

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“I was like, wait, Émile Gallé is an Art Nouveau glassmaker,” Poundstone said. “Like, I know Émile Gallé; I visited Nancy, the city where he lived, and I’ve seen lots of his artwork. This can’t be the same guy. He was very, very elegant in nature; made sinuous, mysterious looking vases… He can’t have made this thing. But he did.”

Later, on a visit to New York City, where her daughter goes to school, Poundstone stopped in at Cooper Hewitt and asked if Figure of a Dog might be on display. It was not, but it was in storage and after an introduction to Emily Orr, associate curator and acting head of product design and decorative arts at Cooper Hewitt, and a shuttle ride to New Jersey, Poundstone got to see the piece she’d come to view as the mascot of her book.

“It was so cool,” said Poundstone. “My daughter said, I’m not sure you’ve ever looked this happy.”

Poundstone’s research also revealed a bit of Olympic history, that of art competitions held from 1912 to 1948, including five categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. The piece in Museum of Dogs, a lithograph on paper by Bertha van Hasselt titled Sleeping Dog, did not medal but, wrote Poundstone in her book, “I would have definitely given her the gold for this absolutely delightful Great Dane.”

Then there is The Pug Lady, a middle finger, as Poundstone said, to Pope Clement XII, who “banned Catholics from being members of the Freemasons.” The ban inspired “a group of rebellious Germans” to make up their own secret society, Mops-Orden, or Order of the Pug.

“Some people got a little spicy,” Poundstone said. “And the Order of the Pug was formed, and this statuette of this woman who’s holding a pug – there’s also a pug peeking out from under her skirt – was sort of like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge. If you saw that in someone’s house, you would know that they were a member.”  

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