Poodle Prints: Miniature and Miniature White

The Poodle is a harder subject than its reputation suggests. The clipped coat is a shape rather than a texture, and it has to read as dense curled hair with a clean outline rather than as a series of grey blobs. On a white poodle the problem is worse again: there is almost no tone to work with, so the whole animal has to be described by the edges and by whatever shadow falls into the coat.

Pamela Ryan's Miniature White Poodle is the one to look at for that reason. Handling a white coat against a pale ground is a real test and it is the kind of thing that separates a drawing from a photograph - a camera flattens it, an artist has to decide where the dog stops.

Mike Sibley's Miniature Poodle is the tighter study. He works in graphite, has been a professional artist for over twenty years and often spends more than two hundred hours on a drawing, and on a curled coat that time is visible.

Poodles also appear in the Toy dogs section alongside the other small breeds if you want to browse more widely.

Both prints are giclee reproductions on archival paper with fade-resistant inks, so nothing yellows over a decade on a wall. Both are nineteen pounds ninety-nine, sized 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.