Everybody here had a job

Almost every animal Pat painted this time was bred to work. She mostly painted them resting.

Look up any of these breeds and you get a job description. The pointer was bred to stop dead when it smelled a bird and hold there, so whoever had the gun had time to get ready. Spaniels pushed birds out of the hedges and brought them back. Dachshund is German for badger dog, which tells you where that one was supposed to go. The Yorkshire terrier caught rats in the mills of northern England a long time before anyone put a bow on one.

Two of them are working in these paintings. The pointer is on point at the edge of a marsh, and the spaniel is coming back through the snow with a pheasant. Everyone else is off the clock. The dachshund is lying on a cushion and the terrier is sitting for his portrait. The fox, the animal a lot of these dogs were bred to go after, is curled up asleep in the grass.

Then the rabbits, who never had a job. One is new. The other two have been with us a while, and they fit here better than anywhere else we've put them.

The new ones came in the middle of October, somewhere between Pennsylvania's junior pheasant hunt and the statewide opener. Same studio near Adamstown, same P. McCarthy in the corner, mostly the same Florentine boards. We wrote down what each animal was bred for next to its painting. You don't need it, but it's there.