Retriever Prints: Golden and Flat Coated

The Golden Retriever is the breed most people picture when they hear the word, and it is a harder subject than it looks. The coat is long, wavy and pale, which in a pencil or a wash gives an artist very little contrast to work with - the whole dog can flatten into a cream shape. Hupfield handles it with a looser, warmer line than a tight graphite study would use, and lets the light do the work along the feathering.

The Flat Coated Retriever is the other, and it is the opposite problem: a black dog, where the difficulty is keeping any detail at all in the coat without lifting it to grey. Ken Messom's version keeps the shine in it, which is the thing owners of black dogs always complain is missing from photographs of them.

Flat Coated Retrievers also have their own page within this section. If you are after Labradors specifically - yellow, black, chocolate or golden - that is a separate and better-stocked section under Dogs, with seven prints in it.

Retrievers are one of the safer subjects to buy as a present. They are the family dog par excellence, and most people who own one own it because of what the breed is like rather than how it looks, which means a good honest drawing lands better than anything stylised.

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 to fit a standard off-the-shelf frame. Each has stayed in its wrapping since the day it was bought and has never been hung or displayed.