Painting by William Barraud:
This also isn’t a particularly large dog.
My guess is this dog has a touch of working collie in its background. It strongly resembles “Gypsy,” one of Queen Victoria’s collies. This retriever’s ears are also a bit high-set.
Adding working collie to the setter/St. John’s water dog cross would reduce size, as well as increasing agility and biddability.
When “retriever” was a job description and not a breed, all sorts of different dogs were used and crossbred. Each sporting gentlemen had his own “recipe” of which breeds behind his retrievers, which is not all that different to how lurchers are bred in Britain and Ireland today. Different lurcher breeders use different sighthound crosses to produce the dogs they like.
Retrievers were basically the lurchers of the shooting gentry.
I have seen these past two dogs you posted work, they usually are not large in size at all, I atually atched them work a test ans did nto know how such a small dog could work so well
When I see these paintings, I always wonder what the dog really looked like. If you go to an open studio or attend an art class you can see that each artist comes up with a very different looking painting when looking at the exact same model as the others in the room. The ears might not be high set at all. The artist might have interpreted the dog’s fur like that because of the artist’s own limitations. It’s not a photo.
Correct, but I’ve seen plenty of paintings of wavy-coats with ears just like this. Some with black and tan coloration.
There are also photos of Queen Victoria’s collies, and they have ears that are exactly like this.
So what you say has validity, but it’s the best we have.
And there is a lot of evidence that wavy-coats were crossed with working collies.
Many, many, many, many accounts.
I find it interesting that everyone is assuming that I don’t know that paintings and sculpture are not photos, when I just wrote a post on this very topic!
The only difference I see between this dog and the one in the painting is the one in the painting has a wavy coat.
https://retrieverman.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/golden-border-collie.jpg Golden retriever and border collie. Compare.