Border Collie Prints by Sibley, Crosby and Ferrier

Mike Sibley's Border Collie is the tightest of them. He works in graphite, has been a professional artist for over twenty years, and often spends more than two hundred hours on a drawing. What that buys on this breed is the eye. A Border Collie's stare is a working tool - it is literally how the dog moves sheep - and a drawing that misses it produces a pleasant black and white dog with nothing going on behind the face. Sibley does not miss it.

B.A. Crosby's Border Collie is the second, and Robbie Ferrier's Border Collie in Spring is the third, a softer and more pastoral treatment with the dog set in a landscape rather than drawn as a portrait. If you want something that reads as a picture of a scene rather than a study of a dog, that is the one.

Mike Sibley's The Gatekeeper also belongs to this breed and sits in the Collies section: a Border Collie at a gate, waiting, and probably the best-known image he has made. Anyone who has worked a collie recognises the posture immediately.

Between them the four give you a fair range of what this dog is - the intensity, the coat, the readiness - which matters more with a Border Collie than with most breeds, because people who own them are unusually particular about how they are represented.

Everything here is a giclee print on archival paper with fade-resistant inks, so nothing yellows over the years. Most are nineteen pounds ninety-nine, sized around 41 x 28 cm before mounting to fit a standard off-the-shelf frame. Each print has stayed in its wrapping since the day it was bought and has never been hung or displayed.