What Rien Poortvliet Got Wrong

A couple of things about this terrific drawing by Rien Poorvliet: a working terrier does not actually work this way. The fox is not above ground, and the dog has little or no opportunity to throttle a fox by the neck. Fox either bolt free or to net, or else they present head or tail in the pipe, and there is very little extra room. If faced with head, a useful terrier (i.e., one that can be worked next week as well as this) will stand back and bay. The terrier and fox are dug to, and the fox is allowed to bolt free at this point, or is shot. A dead fox may be ragged by a terrier, but the dead feel nothing. The point here is that what Poortvliet portrays here is fictional; terrier work is not dog fighting.

That said, Rien Poortvliet was a terrific artist and entirely self-taught -- a self-conscience act which ensured that his style was entirely his.

Born August 7, 1935, Poortvliet was the son of a Dutch plasterer and began his artistic career as a graphics artist for magazines. His most famous (though certainly not his best!) work is a book called ''Gnomes'' which continues to sell well. Poortvliet was always somewhat flummoxed by the fact that The New York Times Best Seller List included the book in the "non-fiction" category. ''Why?'' he asked, ''Do they think there really are gnomes?''

Poortvliet spent two years in the Dutch navy and, as soon as he was old enough, he visited America. "What I learned about America, was that I wanted to go home."

Home was Soest, a village 30 miles southeast of Amsterdam where he lived with his wife, Corrie Bouman, and their collection of rabbits, dogs, cats, chickens, and farm stock.

Poortvliet worked exclusively in water color -- a medium that allowed him to produce fine works at great speed and with the depth of color and texture needed to capture fur, feather, wood, dirt, and the grinding cogs of history. "Sometimes I work with much water," he said. "Sometimes with a very dry brush. Sometimes with a little spit."

Poortvliet's eye for detail and his intuitive understanding of wildlife, dogs and landscape was without parallel, but he was somewhat deficient at observing the modern world. "I can paint for you any animal you want, including humans," he said. "I can paint an elephant from underneath, as if it were walking on a plate of glass above us. I have never seen this, but I can paint it. But, if you ask me to paint the dashboard of my Volkswagen, I would have to go out and look at it in the yard."

The remarkable Rien Poortvliet died in 1995, but his magnificent art lives on, a gift to us all. Along with his book on dogs, I recommend his book, The Living Forest: A World of Animals.