prince’s mother was exiled from court, his father grew cold and distant, and the boy’s only companion was his brother, Ernest, but when Albert was fourteen, Ernest left for college in Bonn. To keep the young Albert entertained, Eos, then a six-month-old puppy, was delivered to the royal family’s home in the Schloss Rosenau, and the pair were soon inseparable. “She was my companion from my fourteenth to my twenty-fifth year,” wrote the prince upon his greyhound’s death, “a symbol therefore of the best and the fairest section of my life.”
When it was Albert’s turn to go to school in Bonn, Eos went with him, and when the prince married Victoria in 1840, at age twenty, the greyhound was sent ahead to Buckingham Palace in the care of her own personal valet. She’d grown into a fetching beast, black with white paws, a white underbelly, and a white tail tip. The newlyweds were both fond of animals and kept a number of dogs at court, but most of these belonged to the queen; Eos alone was decisively Albert’s dog. Six months after their marriage, the prince turned twenty-one, and in honor of the occasion, Victoria commissioned the royal jeweler, Garrard, to make an eight-by-ten-inch silver model of her husband’s greyhound (according to her diary, Albert was “much pleased” with his gift).
On their first anniversary, the queen presented Albert with another surprise: a portrait of Eos by the painter of animals Sir Edwin Landseer. This famous picture is entitled Eos, A Favourite Greyhound, Property of HRH Prince Albert, and it shows the dog posed against a rich red tablecloth, her muscles tense and rippling. Around her neck is a royal red-and-gold collar. With an eager and servile expression, she guards her master’s top hat and gloves, which are laid out ready for him on a hoof-footed, deerskin-covered stool. On a table behind the dog lies her master’s cane, topped with a red tassel and an ivory handle.
In terms of its pose, content, and composition, Eos, A Favourite Greyhound is regarded as an early example of the Victorian tradition of formal pet portraiture, but although the title describes it as a painting of Eos, it is, essentially, a portrait of Albert in absentia. The prince’s status and dignity are represented by his property: the eager bitch and the gentlemanly accessories. In light of the fact that Albert was himself sometimes dismissed as Victoria’s lapdog, perhaps the queen intended the painting as a form of subtle compensation. Either way, Albert was not offended; in fact, the portrait was so well received that she chose to commission another painting by Landseer for Albert’s next birthday, in 1842. In this picture, entitled Victoria, Princess Royal, with Eos, the new princess lies in her crib, and the greyhound—the prince’s other daughter—rests her slim snout protectively between the child’s bare feet. The dog’s gentle pose is perhaps deliberately reminiscent of the legendary hound Gelert, who gave his life to protect a royal baby (see HACHIKŌ).
Albert himself liked to paint and also dabbled in design. One of his more elaborate creations was commissioned over the winter of 1842–43, again in conjunction with Garrard: a colossal set of three gilded candelabra. The main part of this enormous ornament is a four-foot column whose base is decorated with carvings of Eos and three of Queen Victoria’s dogs: her Skye terrier Islay (“a darling little fellow, yellow brindled, rough long hair, very short legs and a large, long, intelligent good face”), her Scottish terrier Cairnach (“he had such dear engaging ways”), and her favorite dachshund, Waldmann. This grotesque gewgaw may have been too much even for Queen Victoria; the following year, it was unloaded on Viscount Melbourne, the former prime minister, on the occasion of his retirement, and it was known thereafter as the Melbourne Centerpiece.
From her portraits and sculptures, we know Eos was a sleek and dignified dog, but we know little about her personality or temperament other than a brief description included by Albert in a letter he wrote to Victoria from Germany before their marriage. In this letter, he describes Eos as “very friendly if there is plum-cake in the room … keen on hunting, sleepy after it, always proud and contemptuous of other dogs.” She may have been rather less keen on hunting after January 1842, when she was accidentally shot by Prince Ferdinand, a relative of Albert’s visiting from Germany. (“Favorites often get shot,” Lord Melbourne reassured the queen, adding that he “has known it happen often.”)
When the queen informed her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, of the accident, he immediately replied to say how sorry he was to hear about what had happened to “dear Eos, a great friend of mine,” and expressed his annoyance at the culprit, Prince Ferdinand, suggesting that “he ought rather to have shot somebody else of the family.” The queen’s subsequent letters are full of information about the dog’s recovery and convalescence. On February 1, 1842, Victoria wrote that Eos “is going on well, but slowly, and still makes us rather anxious.” Four days later, she wrote to let her uncle know that “Eos is quite convalescent; she walks about wrapped up in flannel.”
Happily, the greyhound went on to live two more years after her injury, dying in 1844. Her demise may have been hastened by overindulgence. Shortly before the dog’s death, Victoria wrote to tell King Leopold that Eos had recently suffered from an “attack” that was attributed to “overeating (she steals wherever she can get anything), living in too warm rooms, and getting too little exercise.” She died very suddenly, after seeming quite well an hour before. Albert was devastated. “I am sure,” he wrote to his grandmother, “you will share my sorrow at this loss. She was a singularly clever creature, and had been for eleven years faithfully devoted to me.” Eos was buried beneath a mound above the slopes at Windsor Castle, the resting place of many royal pets before her. On hearing of her demise, Viscount Melbourne, perhaps alarmed that more hideous mementos might be forthcoming, declared himself “in despair at hearing of poor Eos,” but he was on safe ground: the Prince Consort limited himself to designing a life-size bronze monument marking the spot of the greyhound’s grave, and a second sculpture based on Landseer’s original portrait. “Poor dear Albert,” the queen wrote in her journal. “He feels it terribly, & I grieve so for him.” Grieving was something Victoria did well; her mourning for Albert, after he died in 1861, lasted almost forty years.
Even today, dogs are injured and sometimes killed in hunting accidents, though far fewer than in Albert’s day, thank goodness. Still, every age brings its own dangers, and whatever other concerns he may have had about Eos, at least Albert didn’t have to worry about her suffocating in the backseat of a car, overheating in an airplane cargo compartment, or drowning in a swimming pool—all accidents to which, as I know only too well, bulldogs are especially prone. The last of these dangers is perhaps my greatest anxiety, at least in relation to Grisby. It’s obvious these top-heavy dogs aren’t natural swimmers. Their bodies don’t bend in the middle, and their legs can’t paddle fast enough to keep them afloat. “Do not allow your bulldog near water!” warns the author of How to Raise and Train a French Bulldog. “He will sink like a stone!”
But dogs are individuals just as people are, and the fact is, some bulldogs love to swim, just as others—as YouTube amply testifies—love to skateboard, dive, ride on the back of motorcycles, and rock out to the blues. Grisby happens to be one of those dogs that just love water (though he doesn’t like rain and flees from the tub). The first time we took him to a beach, he ran straight into the sea and began to do an odd kind of doggy paddle. Despite his manifest enthusiasm, however, he’s too heavy to keep himself above the surface for long, and I’m always worried about him getting in over his depth.
For two years we lived in California, renting a beautiful ranch-style house with a pool in the backyard. At first, I was kept awake at night by the thought of coming home from work only to find my bulldog’s dead body at the bottom of the pool. And for a while, it seemed my fears were justified—on two occasions, after watching us dive into the deep end, Grisby, wanting in on the fun, did the same thing. Luckily, these two soakings seemed to work as shock therapy; after that, he seemed afraid of the pool and, apart from occasionally growling at the floats, wouldn’t go near it. I couldn’t even get him to sit in the shallow end to cool off. He preferred to snooze under my deck chair in the shade, and his happy snores gave me a good reason to stay lazing in
