Virginia Woolf took up the subject of Barrett Browning’s pet in Flush: a biography, in which she imagines life from the dog’s perspective. In one scene, Woolf addresses a quandary of particular interest to her: that we can feel so close to an animal though it remains ultimately unknowable. She considers Flush’s lack of reaction to his likeness in Barrett Browning’s letter: “He could smell nothing; he could hear nothing … The fact was that they could not communicate with words, and it was a fact that led undoubtedly to much misunderstanding. Yet did it not lead also to a peculiar intimacy?”

One hundred fifty years after Barrett Browning described her relationship with Flush, David Hockney made a similar observation about his dachshunds, Boodgie and Stanley, noting, “These two dear little creatures are my friends ... I notice the shapes they make together, their sadness and their delight.” Special preparations were needed for Hockney’s series of drawings of his dogs: “I had to leave large sheets of paper all over the house and studio to catch them sitting or sleeping without disturbance.” The drawing on view shows Boodgie and Stanley resting on a cushion, curved around one another.

T.S. Eliot — “Old Possum” to his godchildren — published Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats in 1939 with inspiration from his own cat, Jellylorum. The idea for a book of poems about cats and their nature began with an illustrated letter from Eliot to his four-year-old godson Tam Faber. In it, he speaks of Jellylorum, whose “one idea is to be useful.” He “straightens the pictures” by swinging on them and “looks into the dustbin to see that nothing’s wasted.” Eliot illustrated the dust jacket for the first edition on display.

A nineteenth-century drawing by Nicolas Hüet depicts an unusual variety of companion, a giraffe known as Zarafa with her Sudanese caretaker, Atir. The giraffe was a political gift from Muhammed Ali, the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, to Charles X of France in an attempt to convince the King not to interfere in the war between the Ottoman Empire and the Greeks. After a two-year journey from Sudan to Paris (which included two boat rides and a 550 mile walk from Marseilles to Paris), Zarafa lived with Atir in the Jardin des Plantes for eighteen years, where he “slept within scratching reach of her head.”

In October 2010, the Morgan completed the first-ever restoration of its original McKim building, Pierpont Morgan’s private library, and the core of the institution. In tandem with the 2006 expansion project by architect Renzo Piano, the Morgan now provides visitors unprecedented access to its world-renowned collections of drawings, literary and historical manuscripts, musical scores, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, printed books, and ancient Near Eastern seals and tablets.

General Information:  The Morgan Library & Museum 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, New York, NY

Illustration: David Hockney (1937 - ), Boodgie and Stanley, 1993. Crayon on paper. Thaw Collection, ©David Hockney.

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