This image comes from The Shotgun and Sporting Rifle (1859) by John Henry Walsh (Stonehenge).
The dog on the left is the Southern Irish water spaniel or McCarthy’s strain. It is the same breed that we call “Irish water spaniel” today.
The dog on the right is the Northern Irish water spaniel, and it is quite different.
Walsh describes the breeds in his text:
Of the Irish Water Spaniel there are two kinds: the North of Ireland dog, which is given in the annexed engraving; and the South Country water spaniel, of which I have never seen a well-marked specimen. Both are of a liver colour, but the former has often more or less white, while in the latter this is entirely absent. The northern dog is also longer on the legs, with short ears, having little or no feather on them, and both the legs and tail being also almost free from this ornament, and covered instead with a short curly coat, as is also the rest of the body. The southern dog, on the contrary, has long and well-feathered ears, tail round also, and pointed, never being carried above the back; head covered with a perfect top-knot, coming down over the forehead in a peak. These dogs are valued very highly in Ireland, but they are little known out of that country. The northern Irish spaniel is, however, common enough in England and Scotland (pg 145-146.)
If one reads that last sentence a bit carefully, one can see what happened to the Northern Irish water spaniel. It was so celebrated as a retriever in Scotland and Ireland that it was absorbed into the retrievers.
It is much more likely that the curly-coated retriever, which is always said to have Irish water spaniel ancestry, owes a lot to the Northern Irish water spaniel for its ancestry, than the Southern Irish water spaniel, which became much more common as the institutionalized fancy developed.
It is sometimes suggested that the Tweed water spaniel or Tweed water dog was the closest relative to the Norther Irish water spaniel, which itself could probably more accurately be called a water dog rather than a water spaniel. Both of these dogs resembled retrievers and St. John’s water dogs more closely than other water spaniels.
The exact origins of the Northern Irish and Tweed breeds are not well-established, although there is at least one account that says that the Tweed water spaniel was a cross between a water spaniel and a “Newfoundland,” probably the St. John’s water dog. That means that it was an early regional variant of the curly-coated retriever.
If that is the case, then it is probable that the Northern Irish water spaniel was also a cross between some kind of indigenous water spaniel in the North of Ireland and the St. John’s water dog, which was itself occasionally liver in color. The St. John’s breed was almost always marked with white on the feet and chest as we can see in the depiction of the Northern Irish in Stonehenge’s text.
The curly-coated retriever was always a St. John’s water dog crossed with some sort of water spaniel. There are actually two other breeds that were of that exact same cross, although the regional variant of water spaniel was often quite different. In addition to the Tweed, the Norfolk retriever was known to be a cross between the water spaniel of East Anglia and the St. John’s water dog. This breed began to standardize, and it competed in retriever trials up until the First World War. What happened to it is unknown.
It is possible that the standard curly-coated retriever absorbed it, as I highly suspect happened with the bulk of the Northern Irish water spaniel breed. But it is just as possible that it became extinct. Large-scale dog breeding went on hiatus during both World Wars, and if there were not many of these dogs around before the war started, it is very possible for them not to survive the hiatus.
We don’t know how the Northern Irish water spaniel developed. It might even be one of the ancestors of the St. John’s water dog, but I think that if it was known that Tweeds were “Newfoundland”/spaniel crosses, it is possible that this breed had a very similar make-up.
All of the assumptions you make here seem very logical and very plausible. Good picture!
It is a bit misleading to state that a breed or type of dog is a “cross between X and Y”…which suggests that both parents were of a distinct breed or strain, and that those were the only contributors to the end product. For instance, the Golden Retriever is not a cross between wavy-coat retriever and Tweed Water Spaniel– although both were major contributors. Some of the earliest recorded ancestors of the modern breed were of such a cross, others had multiple sorts behind them, and one must realize that the modern Golden Retriever is a breed which has a number of assorted breeds/types/strains in its ancestry. As well as the recorded ancestry, there is a very large number of dogs of no recorded origins that appear in early 20th century pedigrees.
A golden retriever is primarily wavy-coated retriever in ancestry, which is itself was mixture of a lot of things, mainly St. John’s water dog, with a touch of setter or collie or water spaniel.
Golden retrievers and flat-coats are derived from the wavy-coat. The flat-coat and wavy-coat are synonyms, even if the coat texture on the dog varied. The modern flat-coat has bit more setter in it than the old one did.
I have to agree. The retriever breed were a continuous work in progress and the breeders (estate owners) were picking and choosing new matches as the watched the dogs perform during hunts. As I may have mentioned earlier these men talked amongst themselves and their help. They mixed, matched and culled based on how well a dog performed and whether or not a particular trait, (eg retrieving or soft mouth) were passed on with each breeding.
I really do not think they cared as much as modern breeders do if the dog’s coat was straight or wavy or curly. The dog had a job to perform if it failed it was out.