Boxer Dogs: Three Prints, Three Artists

The Boxer is a demanding subject. Everything is in the head - the short muzzle, the undershot jaw, the folds above the eyes, the set of the ears - and the proportions are unforgiving. A few millimetres out and you have a bulldog or a mastiff instead. The body is the opposite problem: short-coated, heavily muscled and almost entirely defined by light, with no fur texture to hide behind.

Mike Sibley's version is the tightest. He works in graphite, has been a professional artist for over twenty years, and often spends more than two hundred hours on a single drawing. On a short-coated dog that time goes into the musculature and the expression rather than the coat.

Gill Evans and Brian Hupfield give you two other readings of the same animal. Hupfield's line is looser and warmer than Sibley's. It is worth looking at all three before deciding, because they suit different rooms - and because Boxer owners tend to be particular about whether a drawing has caught the breed's peculiar mixture of seriousness and idiocy.

All three are giclee prints on archival paper with fade-resistant inks, so nothing yellows over a decade on a wall. All are nineteen pounds ninety-nine. Sizes sit around 41 x 28 cm before mounting, which fits a standard off-the-shelf frame without a trip to a framer.

Each print has stayed in its wrapping since the day it was bought, has never been hung or displayed, and comes to you clean and unmarked.