Puppy Dream 

Lucia Heffernan created this oil painting of a puppy, called Puppy Dream, sometime after 1966. The image of a puppy in a diaper, pacifier in its mouth, and floating tennis balls brings to mind the cultural phenomenon of treating pets as family members. The halo behind the puppy’s head might at first seem like a joke, but could it also be a visual sign of the place that pets occupy in the contemporary home? Note the detail of the safety pins holding the diaper together. Are they a symbol of the DIY aesthetic that is popular today? Or, is it an indicator of the growing trend of pet owners dressing their animals in human clothes? As historians, we might look at advertising from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to understand how visual codes came to be associated with pets. By putting art into its social and institutional context, we can better understand its meaning.