It may be, as Alexander Pope once said, that “The proper study of mankind is man,” but, as is shown by an exhibition now on display at Greenwich’s Bruce Museum, an equally charming subject is man’s best friend.

Best in Show: The Dog in Art from the Renaissance to Today features about fifty works of art capturing the canine by artists ranging from Paulus Potter, Gerrit Dou, and Frans Snyders to Andrew Wyeth, David Hockney, and William Wegman. The exhibition, which the New York Times calls “a dog lover’s picnic,” takes its inspiration from The Dog in Art From Rococo to Post-Modernism (1988) by art historian and dog lover Robert Rosenblum, who also makes a fine contribution to the exhibition catalog, forthcoming from Yale University Press.

“Although the exhibition promises to be highly entertaining and thoroughly accessible to everyone,” runs the review in Antiques and the Arts Weekly, “it will also reveal the high artistic standards that depictions of this most favored and domesticated of creatures have commanded throughout the history of art.”

“[T]here is plenty here to show that as a subject for art dogs can give humans a run for their money,” adds Grace Glueck in the New York Times.

Best in Show: The Dog in Art from the Renaissance to Today will continue at the Bruce Museum until August 27, and it will travel from there to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (October 21, 2006 – January 1, 2007). The handsomely illustrated catalog to the exhibition, which includes a number of seminal essays on the dog and its place in art, “extends the horizons vastly, both in words and pictures,” according to the review in the Wall Street Journal.