Irish Setters: The Irish Setter by Mike Sibley

The Irish Setter is the showiest of the gundogs and the one that loses most in a photograph. The breed is famous for its colour - a deep chestnut red - and a pencil drawing has none of that to work with. Everything has to be done with texture and light instead: the long silky coat, the feathering on the chest and the back of the legs, the way the whole outline moves even when the dog is standing still.

Which is why this drawing is worth looking at properly. Stripped of the colour, what is left is the shape of the animal and the quality of the coat, and both are better than the red usually lets you notice. An Irish Setter in graphite reads as an athlete rather than as a glamorous dog, which is closer to what the breed actually is - these are working gundogs with a great deal of stamina and, by most accounts, not a great deal of sense.

Mike Sibley has been a professional artist for over twenty years, works in graphite, and often spends more than two hundred hours on a single drawing. On a heavily feathered breed that time is visible as individual hairs rather than as general shading, which is the difference between a setter and a red dog with a long coat.

The Gordon Setter, also by Sibley, has its own page, and both sit in the wider Setters section.

This is a giclee print on archival paper with fade-resistant inks, so nothing yellows over the years. 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.