The china spaniel takes its name from the Staffordshire Potteries, where most were made. They were cast as mirror images, one looking left and one right, to sit at either end of a mantelpiece. Queen Victoria kept a King Charles spaniel called Dash, and from the 1840s a pair on the mantel became a common sight in English houses. In Scotland they were called wally dugs.

George Zoltan Lefton left Hungary in 1939, settled in Chicago, and two years later started a company importing porcelain. After the war his figurines came from workshops in Japan and went out to gift counters across the country. Small, hand-painted and priced for a birthday or a thank-you, dogs like these ended up on windowsills and nightstands from the 1950s on.

Through the 1930s and 1940s the Scottish terrier showed up everywhere: on pins, napkin rings, greeting cards and china. In 1940 Franklin Roosevelt's cousin Daisy Suckley gave him a Scottie named Fala, who went nearly everywhere the president did. At the Roosevelt memorial in Washington, Fala sits beside him in bronze. A schnauzer, another wire-coated terrier, keeps these two company.

Kipper's pick: the match holder. A cattle dog respects anything with a job.

A framed needlepoint of a colonial room, stitched by someone who never signed it, and six small oils by Patti McCarthy, a living painter whose work we find in Adamstown. She paints dogs the way people describe their own: sitting where they shouldn't, waiting at the door, waking someone up.

Quincey's pick: the spaniel with the pheasant. Bird dogs stick together.