Flat Coated Retriever Print by Ken Messom

The Flat Coat is the retriever people forget. It was the dominant retrieving breed in Britain before the Labrador and the Golden overtook it in the early twentieth century, and it has never quite come back. Owners tend to be evangelical about it, partly because the breed keeps its puppyishness well into old age and partly because so few people can name it on sight.

Drawing a black dog is a specific technical problem. The temptation is to fill the animal in and hope the outline carries it, which produces a silhouette rather than a dog. What has to happen instead is that the black is kept genuinely dark while the sheen along the back, the skull and the shoulder is allowed to describe the form. Lift it too far and the coat goes grey; hold it too dark and the dog disappears.

Messom keeps the shine in it, which is the thing owners of black dogs always complain their photographs lose. The feathering on the chest, the legs and the underside of the tail is the other marker of the breed, and it separates a Flat Coat from a Labrador at a glance once you know to look for it.

Flat Coated Retrievers also appear in the broader Retriever section and in Labrador, which holds seven prints across the retrieving breeds.

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