Is this the most expensive dog painting ever sold?

Updated 14 Oct 2026

Dog Painting 17 has sold at auction for £3,506,000 making it one of the most expensive dog paintings ever sold at auction.

Stanley and Boodgie were David Hockney’s constant companions, and he painted them more than 40 times. One of those paintings is expected to fetch millions at Christie’s in London.

On 14 October, Dog Painting 17, a portrait of Hockney’s sleeping dachshund Stanley, will be auctioned at Christie’s in London. The estimate is £1.5 million to £2.5 million. Hockney, who died in June at the age of 88, painted it in 1994–95, when Stanley and his fellow dachshund Boodgie were keeping him company at his home in Los Angeles.

The painting shows Stanley fast asleep on a cushion, and looking at it feels wonderfully familiar. Most of our camera rolls are full of our dogs sleeping in all sorts of funny, cosy positions. Hockney just happened to turn those everyday moments into works of art.

Stanley, named after Stan Laurel, went everywhere with Hockney. Hockney brought him home as a puppy in 1987, and Boodgie joined the household soon after. The two of them were painted more than 40 times in the mid-1990s. Mostly, they were asleep.

There’s something lovely about the fact that Hockney chose to spend so much time painting his dogs doing very little. Anyone who lives with a dog will recognise those quiet moments when they’re simply happy to be nearby, curled up in their favourite spot while life carries on around them.

Hockney began painting the series during a difficult period in his life. He had lost several close friends, including the curator Henry Geldzahler, who died in 1994, and he later said he “wanted desperately to paint something loving”. With Stanley and Boodgie beside him, he found his inspiration close to home.

When the paintings went on show at LA Louver in Los Angeles, Hockney recalled that around 7,000 people visited in four days, many bringing their own dogs. We love the thought of all those people arriving at an art gallery with their dogs to look at paintings of somebody else’s. Perhaps they recognised a little of their own lives in what Hockney had painted.

The paintings and drawings were later collected in David Hockney’s Dog Days, published in 1998, a book filled with the familiar shapes of two dachshunds curled up on cushions, blankets and wherever else they happened to settle.

Christie’s believes only six paintings from the series are in private hands, and Dog Painting 17 is the first to come up at auction, which goes some way towards explaining the estimate.

“This is such an exciting painting for us,” said Tessa Lord, Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art. “The rarity is kind of extraordinary.”

The painting is on free public display at Christie’s in London ahead of the auction on 14 October.

Christie’s estimates it could fetch up to £2.5 million. We think it’s priceless.