Argos and Odysseus: A Vintage Art Poster from Briton Riviere's Painting of Homer's Faithful Dog
A man in a beggar’s rags stands on a sunlit marble terrace above the sea, head bowed. At his feet an old hound lies on the warm stone and lifts his eyes. Nothing else happens, and that is the whole story. This poster takes Briton Riviere’s Victorian picture of Odysseus and his dog Argos and finishes it the way a 1920s gallery or steamship sheet would: a deep blue sky, cream lettering in large Roman capitals, a thin gold border and laurel corners.
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A painting, held as a poster. Most of the posters on this blog start from our own photographs. This one starts from a Victorian canvas. The source is Briton Riviere’s painting of the scene from Homer, shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1873 under the simple title Argus. The poster is the interpretation. It is not the painting, and it does not pretend to be.
Source painting: Argus, also known as Argos and Odysseus, by Briton Riviere (1840–1920)
Date: 1872–73, exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1873
Whereabouts: Private collection
Story: Homer, Odyssey, Book 17
Subject: Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, and his old dog Argos on Ithaca
Poster: Sapiens Verbum
Work: Vintage art poster
Twenty years and one wag of the tail
In Book 17 of the Odyssey, Odysseus comes home to Ithaca after twenty years, disguised by Athena as an old beggar so the suitors in his palace will not recognise him. At the gate lies Argos, the dog he raised as a puppy before he sailed for Troy, now old, neglected and lying on a dung heap. Argos knows him at once. He drops his ears and wags his tail, but he has no strength left to come to his master. Odysseus cannot greet him without giving himself away, so he turns aside and wipes away a tear. Then, Homer says, the fate of black death took Argos, once he had seen his master again in the twentieth year.
We tell the longer story of the painting, and of Riviere as an animal painter, in our essay Argos and Odysseus by Briton Riviere on Sapiens Verbum.
The vintage art poster
The painting stays as the bones. The column stands on the left, the low marble wall runs across the middle, the bay and the hills open behind it, and the gap of empty pavement between the man and the dog stays exactly as wide as Riviere left it. What the poster adds is what a sheet for a wall needed and a Salon canvas did not: a frame, period lettering, and a flatter, brighter palette of Aegean blue, cream, warm sand and olive green.
The lettering is ARGOS in large cream capitals across the sky, with AND ODYSSEUS beneath it and a thin line that reads BRITON RIVIÈRE · 1872. Gold laurel sprigs mark the corners, and a small SAPIENS VERBUM signs the foot. The clouds catch an evening gold, ivy climbs the column, and small weeds grow between the paving stones, a hint of a house left too long without its master. Argos is still Argos. The border is the only fiction.
Why it works as a poster
A good poster has to read from across a room, and this scene does. There are only two figures, one standing and one lying down, one dark and one golden, with a bright sea behind them. You understand the picture before you read a word of it. And the subject needs no translation: anyone who has waited for a dog at a door, or been waited for, knows what is happening on that terrace. It is a story about loyalty that is almost three thousand years old, told without a single line of dialogue.
The painting behind the poster
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Riviere was the leading animal painter of Victorian England, and he painted animals as seriously as other artists painted kings. His Argus was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873, and he also made a signed watercolour of the subject that year, inscribed with Alexander Pope’s translation of the passage. The original canvas is in a private collection and is not on public view. A buyer of the poster is not getting the painting. They are getting the poster made from it, designed and interpreted by Sapiens Verbum.
The series continues with other posters: Arcos de la Frontera, Inside Cádiz Cathedral and Ferrol and the Juan Sebastián Elcano, and with the European cities, Prague, Old Town Square and the Týn Church and Vienna, The Staatsoper and the Ringstrasse.
Bring Odysseus and his faithful Argos to your wall as a vintage art poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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💬 Over to you: The painting tells the story. The poster puts it on your wall. Which one would you hang? Tell us in the comments.
More posters in the Vintage Art Poster series, and the full story in our essay on Argos and Odysseus by Briton Riviere.
Sources
Homer, Odyssey, Book 17 — Perseus Digital Library
Wikipedia — Briton Rivière
Christie’s — Briton Riviere, Argus, watercolour, 1873 (RA 1873, no. 464)
Sapiens Verbum — Argos and Odysseus by Briton Riviere
Sapiens Verbum — Argos and Odysseus vintage art poster
▶️ Watch on YouTube: Homer’s Saddest Scene: Odysseus, Argos, and Riviere’s Painting on @SapiensVerbum
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