Sinclair Stratton featured this month on Forbes.com!

Forbes Life

Sit!
Kiri Blakeley, 09.30.02

It may not appreciate, but at least a portrait of your pet will deliver psychic dividends.
What self-respecting art collector would hang a portrait of Fido next to a Picasso? A fair number, it seems. "I'd rather sell my Rembrandt than my Beau Bradford," says oil heiress Sandra Stream Miller, former wife of fashion designer Nolan Miller. She also owns works by Degas, Renoir and Erté. But it's the portraits of her Welsh terrier Winston (now deceased) and of two Brussels Griffon puppies that she esteems the most, having commissioned them in 1985 from California artist Bradford.

While you have to be a pretty rabid pet-lover to commission such works, you don't necessarily have to be a philistine. "It's an ancient art form," says Paige Powell, who spent 20 years as an art curator and photographer. "For centuries, court paintings were often portraits of people with their pets."

Powell herself has spent at least $20,000 on portraits of her two dogs, and proudly hangs them (the paintings, not the dogs) alongside the rest of her collection, which includes Andy Warhol's portrait of Yves Saint Laurent's terrier, and a rendering by Jean-Michel Basquiat (Powell's former boyfriend) of two chimpanzees.

If you're lucky or shrewd or both, Bowser might someday fetch more than slippers and the newspaper. Just don't count on an overnight capital gain. A portrait of a Newfoundland hound commissioned in 1803 by Frederick, Duke of York, second son of King George III, sold for $3.7 million in 1999.

Some portraitists:

Sinclair Stratton, 33, San Diego, Calif.
Fee: $1,100 to $2,500

Stratton only began painting pet portraits professionally a couple of years ago, and doesn't have the high-profile reputation or clientele. But luckily for you that means she doesn't have a high price either?yet. Her bright, highly stylized watercolors are reminiscent of Ron Burns' portraits. Taking another tip from Burns, she's active in donating her work and a portion of the profits to local animal shelters. Her favorite subject is her cat Smudge, whom she found as a starving kitten. An original Smudge portrait goes for $1,500 (she's sold two since April; the profits go to a local feral rescue group). "I like painting cats better than dogs. Maybe it's because I'm a cat person; but a cat's face is more complex than a dog's." Grab her now before her price skyrockets?it's doubled since last year.

Beau Bradford, 52, Los Angeles, Calif.
Fee: $5,000 to $10,000
Commissions per year: 10
Clients include: Hugh Hefner, Richard Donner (movie director), Billie Milam Weisman (head of Frederick Weisman Art Foundation)

If you ever thought Van Gogh's "Irises" would be perfect if only your dog or cockatoo were in it, then Bradford is for you. He was working as a fashion model in Paris when Andy Warhol convinced him to become an artist and move to New York, where he started adding friends, then their pets, into replicas of famous works. Today he rarely paints humans at all, which suits him fine. "Dogs don't complain that the portrait doesn't look like them," he says.

Ronald Burns, 47, Napa, Calif.
Fee: $15,000 to $150,000 (for a 15' X 7')
Commissions per year: 6
Clients include: Nick Faldo (Masters-winning golfer), Brian Boitano (Olympic gold medalist figure skater)

Burns' style has become extremely collectible. Reproductions of his deft kitty and pooch work sell for $600 to $2,000; prints for $20. A pharmaceutical company offered him $500,000 to license his work for marketing a pet medicine, but he declined: "A collector wants a unique piece of work--not one that can be found at Wal-Mart and RiteAid." Travel to spend a few days with the animal, in order to absorb its personality, is extra: expenses plus $500 to $1,000 a day.

Constance Depler Coleman, 75, Cincinnati
Fee: $5,500 and up
Commissions per year: 10
Clients include: Oprah Winfrey, Oscar de la Renta, Mrs. Andrew Carnegie Rose

She began, 50 years ago, by painting the type of caricatures that show dogs drinking in a bar. Now the artist of choice for several Forbes 400 members, she licenses her work extensively, earning royalties of about $100,000 a year. Her portrait of Rocky--a sad-looking Great Dane draped over a sofa--sells countless birthday and get-well cards for Marcel Schurman.

Rachelle Oatman, 40, Milan, Italy and New York City
Fee: $2,000 to $6,000
Commissions per year: 24
Clients include: designers Jean-Paul Gaultier, Valentino and Princess Caroline of Monaco

Oatman specializes in anthropomorphic paintings of pets dressed in historical or contemporary fashions. Want your Boston terrier in a Chanel suit? She's your woman. In Europe, Oatman says, people take their animal portraiture more seriously. "I get more respect there," she sniffs. Claude Taittinger, of the champagne family, had his bull mastiff rendered as Napoleon III.

Roger Henry, 37, Los Angeles, Calif.
Fee: $6,500 and up
Commissions per year: 5 to 10
Clients include: Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant

Henry's portraits are so finely detailed they appear, at first glance, to be photographs. Edward Hopper's influence is seen clearly in such examples as "Sherlock" (see p. 374). Like Bradford, he prefers four-legged subjects: "You don't have to deal with a dog's ego."

Leslie Ann Butler Yank, 56, Portland, Ore.
Fee: $900-$5,000

Butler, with little formal art training, began 15 years ago using colored pencil to sketch people and their pets. At first, she was practically giving the portraits away to get her name established. These days, she's sketching Michael Jackson and his pet llama, and the senior Bushes with ex-first dog Millie. Now she uses acrylic to render pets in a more impressionistic style. "People love their animals?sometimes more than their kids," says Butler, who notes that her clients often want their pets done instead of, or before, their children. Then there are the perils of pet portraiture: One doggie expressed itself on her rug.

Mimi Vang Olsen, 64, Manhattan.
Fee: $2,500 for one animal; $500 per additional pet
Clients: "I don't want to name names. My work speaks for itself."

Vang Olsen's artwork can be found in any card store; publisher Pomegranate licenses her crisply realistic portraits of cats and dogs for calendars, postcards. The Humane Society of New York gets the profits from posters and greeting cards. Vang Olsen, who started as a human portraitist, began painting pets 20 years ago when she noticed how many people were walking their dogs in her West Village neighborhood.

[ARTIST CONTACT INFO FOLLOWS]

Sinclair Stratton 1-800-824-2272

Oatman, Henry and Coleman can be found at: www.dogartdealer.com

Beau Bradford 310-246-0159

Leslie Ann Butler Yank 503-295-1018

Ronald Burns www.ronburns.com

Mimi Vang Olsen 212-675-5410

For still more artists who specialize in pet portraiture, contact Decorating Arts of Princeton, N.J.: 908-904-4513; www.decoratingarts.com.