Philip Reinagle began his career as a portraitist having trained with Allan Ramsay. However, during the 1780s and 1790s he began to concentrate instead on landscape and animal painting. During the first decade of the 19th century Reinagle began to specialise in dog painting. This new interest was encouraged by his friendship with the eccentric Colonel Thomas Thornton (1751/2-1853), a keen huntsman and breeder of greyhounds who was also a collector of animal paintings. Reinagle established a reputation as a dog painter through his series of pictures of sporting dogs, which were engraved and published in William Taplin's The Sportsman's Cabinet , London 1803. At least one of the dogs represented in this publication was owned by Thornton.

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