Canine companions appeared throughout Pablo Picasso’s life, becoming muses in their own right to join the ranks of his female partners like Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Roque. Though later in his life he owned many dogs – including a cadre of Afghan hounds – earlier in his career he took the dogs of his friends and family as subjects, like Sentinelle, a German Shepherd Picasso had met by 1914 that belonged to painter André Derain. From poodles to dachshunds, Picasso gave these pups the same aesthetic treatments as his human subjects, morphing and contorting their forms through his Cubist lens. L’Homme au chien is no exception, demonstrating the artist’s propensity for creating compositions expertly fragmented yet intelligible.

As art historian and curator Donna Stein described, “in a group of preparatory drawings Picasso had resolved the final outline of Man with Dog of 1914, which was published in 1930. In large overlapping areas etched to resemble collage or papier collé techniques, Picasso represents a man seated at a café reading a newspaper. A schematically splayed but recognizable dog naps at his side – a whimsical allusion to the artist’s domestic life. Various aspects of a table are seen to the right. The man’s legs and the legs of the table are united. The T-shaped nose and eyes are part of Picasso’s invented Synthetic lexicon. On the upper left, the naturalistic silhouette of a man’s head and shoulders is drawn as if reflected in a mirror. There is no modeling or definition within the layered flats except for the newspaper, where separate sections pun on the fragmented masthead letters of “Le Journal.” Picasso uses simultaneity of observation, repetition and direction of line to fracture the composition, all the while asserting its legibility by incorporating realistic details. The view through the window on the upper left hints at a theme which consumed Picasso’s energies for several years and culminated in the great Synthetic painting of 1920, Open Window on the rue de Penthièvre in Paris.”ⁱ

ⁱDonna Stein, “Braque and Picasso,” in The Cubist Print, 1981, p. 30