Your pet, where an animal already stood.
Almost every great painting has an animal in it already — a lapdog at the feet of a bride, an ermine in a lady's arms, a hound asleep under the table. We replace that one animal with yours, and leave the rest of the picture exactly as the artist left it.
Not a costume portrait
Most pet portraits put the animal in the starring role — your dog in a ruff, your cat as Napoleon. They are meant to be funny, and they read as jokes from across the room.
We are after the opposite. The people stay, the room stays, the light stays. Your pet takes a place that was always there, at the same scale and in the same pose, so the painting still looks like the painting. The pleasure is slower: a friend studies it for a while and then realises whose dog that is.
How it is made
Every base painting is a public-domain work, photographed by the museum that holds it. We work digitally. The animal the artist painted is replaced, and the new one is built to match what surrounds it — the brushwork, the direction of the light, the muted palette, the craquelure and darkened varnish of a canvas that has been hanging for four hundred years. A pet dropped onto an old painting looks pasted on; the whole craft is in not looking pasted on.
Nothing else in the picture is touched. We work from your photograph and match the markings that make your pet recognisably yours — the blaze, the odd ear, the dark tip of the tail.
Every commission is looked at by a person before it is sent, next to the photograph you supplied. If it does not look like your pet, we do it again. If we still cannot get there, we refund you. We would rather refund than send you something you do not recognise.
The paintings
Forty works, across five traditions, all in the public domain — the artists have been gone for centuries and their paintings belong to everyone, including your cat. Western oils from van Eyck to Seurat, Qing court scrolls, Japanese prints, Mughal albums, Korean genre paintings.
Who we are
A small studio. PetInMasterpieces is a trading name of CJ Meridian LLC, which is the seller of record for every order and the party responsible for delivery and refunds.
Write to contact@cjmeridian.com with anything at all — a question before you order, a photograph you are not sure about, a painting you wish we carried. We usually answer within two business days.
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