Historical Figures and Their Dogs: Twelve Verified Stories, from Goya to Sigmund Freud

In Room 67 of the Prado Museum in Madrid hangs a painting that was read for a century as a metaphor for the end of the world. A dog's head peers over an ochre slope, looking upward, surrounded by an immense void. It is Goya's The Dog (often called The Half-Submerged Dog), painted around 1820. Then, in 1874, the photographer Jean Laurent recorded the walls of the Quinta del Sordo before the Black Paintings were detached from them. In that image you could still make out what the animal was looking at: two birds fluttering overhead. The restoration made them disappear. The Prado's most enigmatic canvas was, in fact, a seventy-four-year-old man painting a happy dog watching little birds fly.

Almost everything that follows works the same way. The history of great figures and their dogs is full of details that have been lost, misread, or embellished over time. There is a German king buried beside eleven Italian Greyhounds. A Romantic poet who wiped the foam from a rabid dog with his bare hand. A queen hiding a terrier under her skirts on the scaffold. And a pug that bit Napoleon on his wedding night and left him a scar for life. Twelve verified scenes, documented well enough to tell without inventing a single word.

Why did so many kings, writers, and scientists love their dogs more than almost anyone else?

A pattern repeats. Figures with difficult human relationships (Frederick the Great with his abusive father, Byron with half of England against him, Freud fleeing Nazism) poured into their dogs an emotional intensity they rarely allowed themselves in other bonds. This is not a romantic theory. Tim Blanning's biography of Frederick the Great (2015) documents that the king sent a courier from the front, every day, to ask after the health of a sick dog. Sigmund Freud wrote of his Chow Chow Jofi that "dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object relations." He could have written an entire book on that alone.

Layered onto that intensity was a more practical drive. Before photography, having yourself portrayed with a dog at your side was a statement of identity. Loyalty, vigilance, self-control, status, refined taste, or a hunter's steady hand. That is why Italian Greyhounds appear in a hundred European court portraits of the 1600s and 1700s, mastiffs in the Habsburg portraits, and why Hogarth painted himself in 1745 with his pug Trump in the foreground, almost mimicking his own face. If you take a selfie with your dog today and post it to Instagram, you are doing exactly what Emperor Charles V did with Titian in 1533. Just without Titian.

Charles V and the English dog that traveled through three countries across four centuries (1533)

Charles V, emperor of half the world, loved big dogs. In 1533, Titian painted him full-length in Bologna, his left hand resting on the back of a large dog and his right on the pommel of his dagger. The painting hangs in Room 24 of the Prado and stands nearly two meters (about 6.5 feet) tall: walk up to it and the dog reaches roughly to your waist.

The curious detail is that this dog was, in fact, a female. Jacob Seisenegger, another painter who portrayed the emperor with the same animal a year earlier, noted it in his correspondence with Ferdinand of Austria, specifying that she was "of an English breed." Historians of dogs believe she looked a good deal like the livestock-guarding mastiffs still seen in many Castilian villages. Some authors suggest she was named Sampere, though the source is late and not entirely reliable.

The extraordinary part is the painting's odyssey. It appears in the inventories of the Alcázar of Madrid in 1600. In 1623, Philip IV gave it to Charles I of England (a Habsburg presenting a Stuart with the official portrait of his grandfather, a carefully calculated political gesture). When Parliament beheaded the English king in 1649 and auctioned off his goods, the Spanish ambassador Alonso de Cárdenas bought the canvas back on August 8, 1651, and carried it home to Madrid. The English female dog had crossed the Channel twice without ever leaving the painting.

Mary, Queen of Scots, and the dog hidden under her skirts (1587)

Robert Wynkfield, an eyewitness, set it down in writing. On February 8, 1587, at Fotheringhay Castle, when the executioner moved to lift the skirts of Mary, Queen of Scots (just beheaded on his third attempt, having struck only the back of her neck with the first blow), he uncovered a small dog that had ridden hidden under her petticoats the whole way up to the scaffold. The animal refused to move from the body. It lay down between the severed head and the shoulders, soaked in blood. They pulled it away by force, washed it, and handed it to a French princess on the condition that she take it out of the realm.

The primary source does not specify the breed. Tradition speaks of a Skye Terrier; other accounts describe a small white dog that would point to a Maltese (Mary was herself known for her Malteses during her English captivity). The name "Geddon" or "Armageddon" that circulates online does not appear in any sixteenth-century source. It surfaced centuries later, probably in some historical novel, and passed from there into folklore. For the record.

Frederick the Great, his Italian Greyhounds, and the strangest funeral of the 1700s (1740-1991)

Frederick II of Prussia (philosopher king, ruthless soldier, friend of Voltaire until they fell out in a shouting match) called his favorite Italian Greyhounds "my Marquises de Pompadour," mocking the French king's mistress. He owned between forty and eighty of them over his lifetime. His order to the household staff was unambiguous: the dogs were to be addressed as Sie, the formal German "you," never du. In other words, at Sanssouci there were human beings you could address informally, and Italian Greyhounds who required the formal form.

His favorite was named Biche. By the records, she weighed about 4 pounds (1.75 kg). For scale: a large bag of sugar. During the Seven Years' War, Frederick tucked her into his pack to cross enemy lines. When Biche died in 1752, in the palace concert hall, the king wrote to his sister Wilhelmine: "I am ashamed that the death of a dog could affect me so deeply." He kept writing her letters in which the two of them spoke in the voices of their respective dogs. Countess Alcmene, a later Italian Greyhound, was buried in the same crypt as the king, an honor no human being shared with him.

When Frederick died in 1786, he left his final wish in writing: to be buried on the terrace of Sanssouci, beside the graves of his eleven Italian Greyhounds, without ceremony. His nephew and heir, Frederick William II, ignored the request and buried him in the garrison church. Two hundred and five years had to pass before the will was honored. On the night of August 17, 1991, with Germany reunified, the coffin was at last moved to the terrace of the dogs. Visitors leave potatoes on the gravestone today, because it was Frederick who introduced them to Prussia. The tradition continues.

Lord Byron and Boatswain, the Newfoundland who got the most expensive tomb at Newstead (1808)

Byron was twenty when his Newfoundland Boatswain contracted rabies. He nursed the dog himself for weeks, wiping the foam from its mouth with his bare, ungloved hand, as his biographer Thomas Moore recounts. We now know that contagion happens precisely that way. By sheer luck (or sheer innate immunity), Byron was never infected.

Boatswain died on November 18, 1808. Byron, deep in debt, commissioned a marble monument for him at Newstead Abbey, the largest on the entire estate. Larger, in fact, than the tomb he himself would have sixteen years later. He asked to be buried next to the dog: he was refused, because by then the abbey had a new owner. The prose epitaph on the monument (attributed for two centuries to Byron himself, now thought to be the work of his friend John Cam Hobhouse) is one of the most quoted passages about dogs in English literature.

Joséphine Bonaparte, Napoleon, and a pug with a very bad temper (1796)

On March 9, 1796, the civil marriage of Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine de Beauharnais took place. Napoleon arrived two hours late, the first bad start. That same night, Fortuné, Joséphine's pug, bit the newlywed on the calf when he climbed into bed, the second bad start. The scar lasted his whole life. Joséphine spent the rest of the night applying compresses to her husband, who complained that he was "dying of hydrophobia." He did not die of it.

What few people know is that this pug had a prior résumé. When Joséphine had been locked in the Les Carmes prison during the Terror in 1794, Fortuné was the only courier between her and her two children, carrying messages hidden under his collar. He died in a fight with the cook's mastiff at the Montebello residence. Joséphine, heartbroken, got another pug. One morning the cook begged Napoleon's pardon for what had happened. The emperor's reply, recorded by his biographers: "Let him loose again. Let's see if he can free me from this one too."

Sigmund Freud and the Chow Chows in the Berggasse consulting room (1928-1939)

Dogs had not interested Sigmund Freud until he was seventy. That changed in 1925, when his daughter Anna brought home a German Shepherd named Wolf. In 1928 he was given his first Chow Chow, Lün-Yu. After this dog's early death (struck by a train at the Salzburg station, an accident that cost Freud seven months of grief) came Jofi, the dog who became famous for being present during psychoanalysis sessions through the 1930s.

Freud used her as an emotional thermometer. If Jofi lay down near the patient, he read it as a sign of relaxation. If she moved away or scratched at the door to leave, he would joke, "Jofi doesn't like what you're saying." His son Martin recounted that the father did not check the clock, because Jofi would stand and stretch exactly when the fifty-minute session ended. She was as punctual as an Austrian civil servant. The poet Hilda Doolittle, a patient of Freud's, complained in her memoir that "the Professor was more interested in Jofi than in my story." It is probably the first documented case of dog-assisted therapy, though Freud never theorized it as such.

When the Freuds fled Vienna in 1938, they took the last Chow, Lün, with them. British law required a six-month quarantine. The reunion between Freud and Lün in London, that December, made the front page of the Daily Mail.

Goya, The Dog, and the photograph that rescued a smile (1819-1823)

In 1819, Francisco de Goya bought a country house on the outskirts of Madrid, by the Manzanares River, known as the Quinta del Sordo (the Deaf Man's Villa). He was seventy-three, had survived an illness that left him almost completely deaf, and shut himself away to paint directly on the walls of the house. The fourteen paintings that came out of there, the Black Paintings, are the most radical works in the entire history of Spanish art.

The most enigmatic is the one you already know: The Dog. The animal's head rises over an ochre slope, alone in an immense, empty field. The twentieth-century painter Antonio Saura called it "the most beautiful painting in the world" and devoted an entire series of homages to it. For generations of Prado visitors, it has been the definitive metaphor for existential dread.

Until 1874, before the painting was detached from the wall to be sold, Jean Laurent photographed it. In that image you could still make out the upper section, lost afterward in the move: a large rock and, above it, two birds fluttering. The dog is not staring into the void. It is watching birds. The grim reading collapsed once a researcher, Carlos Foradada, confirmed it in 2010 with a fresh analysis of the photograph. The Quinta del Sordo was demolished in 1909. Today, on the exact spot where Goya painted that scene, there is an apartment building with a small plaque on the facade.

Queen Victoria: 88 dogs, 32 breeds, and Battersea's first patron (1837-1901)

Across her sixty-four-year reign, Victoria kept more than six hundred animals among her residences, with a core of up to fifty-five dogs at once in the royal kennels at Windsor. Her first favorite was Dash, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel given to her when she was eleven, whom she personally bathed on the very day of her coronation in 1838. A newly crowned queen, the crown still gleaming, bathing her spaniel. There are miniatures of the scene in the Royal Collection.

Three animals deserve a separate mention. Sharp, a bearded Scottish collie, was her companion between 1866 and 1879 and appears in a dozen official photographs. Looty, a Pekingese, arrived in the United Kingdom in 1861 as a spoil of war: Captain John Hart Dunne had taken her from the Summer Palace in Beijing after the sack of October 1860, during the Second Opium War. The name, in English Looty, comes from loot. Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl painted her in oil in 1865, and the picture remains in the Royal Collection. Turi, a Pomeranian under 6 pounds (about 3 kg), sat on the queen's lap on her deathbed at Osborne House on January 22, 1901.

Her personal devotion to the Pomeranian (which she had imported from Florence in 1888) had a measurable effect. At the 1891 Crufts show, six Pomeranians from the royal kennel were entered, and the breed went from the 26-pound dogs common in its native Germany to the 7 or 8 pounds of today. If your neighbor carries a mini Pomeranian in a tote bag down Main Street, thank Queen Victoria, indirectly.

Picasso and Lump: the Dachshund who sneaks into Las Meninas (1957)

Pablo Picasso, born in Málaga though he lived in France from 1904, liked large and slightly eccentric dogs: Afghan Hounds, Dalmatians, Boxers. Then, in April 1957, the American photographer David Douglas Duncan turned up at his Cannes villa with a Dachshund named Lump (German for "rascal"). Lump walked in, put his paws on the painter's thighs in the middle of lunch, gave him a kiss, and decided that this was his place. Picasso ratified the decision. The dog stayed six years.

Four months later, Picasso began a series of fifty-eight variations on Velázquez's Las Meninas, now at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. In forty-five of those paintings, the giant mastiff that Velázquez had placed in the foreground in 1656 is replaced by Lump. Three and a half centuries between the two dogs, one country, two museums 370 miles apart.

Twelve stories, one inescapable conclusion

If you have read this far, you will have seen a pattern. The great historical figures did not love their dogs because it was sentimental, or because it was profitable, or even because it was fashionable. They loved them because, in a life of power, of exile, of censorship, or of solitude, the dog was the only thing that asked nothing in return. Frederick the Great put it best in 1752: a person who is not moved by the death of a loyal animal will not be moved by the death of a human companion either. Two hundred and seventy years later, it is still the most precise sentence on the subject.

Summary table: twelve figures, twelve dogs

Figure	Dog	Breed	Year / context
Charles V	"English" female (Sampere?)	Mastiff type	1533, Titian portrait
Mary, Queen of Scots	No verified name	Skye Terrier or Maltese (debated)	Feb 8, 1587, execution
Frederick II of Prussia	Biche, Alcmene, and 9 others	Italian Greyhound	1740-1786, Sanssouci
Lord Byron	Boatswain	Newfoundland	1803-1808, Newstead Abbey
Joséphine Bonaparte	Fortuné	Pug	1790s, during the Terror and the marriage
Queen Victoria	Dash, Sharp, Looty, Turi	Cavalier, collie, Pekingese, Pomeranian	1830-1901
Goya	The Dog	Unidentified	1819-1823, Black Paintings
Sigmund Freud	Jofi, Lün, Lün-Yu	Chow Chow	1928-1939, Vienna and London
Pablo Picasso	Lump	Dachshund	1957-1963, La Californie

Frequently asked questions

Which historical figure's dog is the best documented?

Probably Boatswain, Lord Byron's Newfoundland. His tomb at Newstead Abbey, the stone epitaph, the poet's letters to Francis Hodgson dated November 18, 1808, and the abbey's parish records let you verify nearly every detail. In second place, Jofi, Freud's Chow Chow, photographed dozens of times and mentioned throughout the psychoanalyst's diaries and correspondence.

Which dogs are portrayed in the Prado Museum?

Without being exhaustive: the English female dog of Charles V (Titian, 1533), multiple mastiffs in the work of Velázquez (including the dog in Las Meninas, 1656), Goya's half-submerged dog (1819-1823), and the dogs in the royal equestrian portraits. The Prado has more dogs than many shelters, all identified well enough to make a themed visit.

Was Napoleon really bitten by a pug on his wedding night?

Yes. The direct source is Napoleon himself, recorded by the playwright Antoine-Vincent Arnault and cited in The Pug Who Bit Napoleon by Mimi Matthews (2018). The scar lasted until the day he died on Saint Helena.

What about the story of Marie Antoinette's dog named Mops?

The existence of a pug the archduchess is said to have called Mops in her Austrian childhood is plausible: "Mops" in German simply means "pug." Better documented is that she asked for a pug to be sent to Versailles, which duly happened. The cinematic scene of the dog torn from her arms at the French border, by contrast, does not appear in contemporary sources and seems a twentieth-century invention, probably derived from a mistranslation.