Nature & Animals Quote by Samuel Johnson

Johnson is picking a fight with the kind of art that flatters the educated viewer for “getting it.” In one clean preference - a dog you know over every allegorical canvas on earth - he elevates recognition above reverence, the particular above the grandly symbolic. The jab lands because it sounds almost petty, even anti-cultured, but it’s really a high-minded insistence on moral and emotional honesty: art should tether itself to lived experience, not outsource feeling to a codebook of emblems.

The portrait of a familiar dog is doing a lot of work here. It’s not “nature” in the abstract, not the generic pastoral that allegory loves. It’s relationship, memory, and specificity - the small private archive of a life. Johnson’s line implies that allegory often functions as prestige packaging: noble figures, classical references, Virtue personified, everyone nodding along. You can admire it without being moved, because the meaning arrives pre-labeled. A known dog, by contrast, can’t be appreciated at a distance. You either know it or you don’t, and if you do, the painting becomes a trigger for attachment and time.

Context matters: Johnson is an 18th-century critic of affectation, suspicious of anything that feels like performance for its own sake. Allegorical painting was a dominant “serious” mode in elite culture, the kind of thing that turns art into a social password. His preference is a quiet democratization of taste: give me the work that remembers someone (or some creature), not the work that congratulates the viewer for decoding it.