Endearing COMPANIONS

When wolves were brave enough to wander into human encampments to consume scraps of food perhaps 30,000 years ago, they began a chain of evolution in which wild animals became domesticated working animals and eventually pets some were even bred to be, well, cute

- JOHN O'HERN

Dogs evolved from the wolves, developing smaller jaws and teeth. Domesticated cats came along around 7,000 B.C. with the advent of agriculture-stored grain that attracted mice, that attracted cats.

Pets have been subjects in paintings for thousands of years, but by the 18th-century they appeared as status symbols and as symbols themselves for other qualities. In 1787 to 88, Francisco Goya painted Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, an elegantly dressed 3 or 4-year-old boy surrounded by pets-a magpie tethered to a string, finches in a cage and three wide-eyed cats gazing hungrily at the magpie which holds Goya's calling card in its beak.

The animals have been burdened with various interpretations over the years and, certainly, they weren't included in the composition by accident. The caged finches have been interpreted as the soul or the boy's innocence; the cats as evil, the magpie with the calling card as gossip. Regardless, the pleasant first impression of the scen gives way to a sense of foreboding.

In Mian Situ's Companionship, dogs play at the feet of a woman holding a child in maternal companionship. The dogs are companions to one another and, one day, will be companions to the child. Situ was brought up in the rural countryside of China, a place of simple living. With the advent of Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution, however, all academic teaching came to an end. Some, like Situ, turned to art. In his paintings, he tells stories of the beauty in the day-to-day life of Chinese people as he says, "the rhythms of their lives."