Page 5 - THE SLOUGHI REVIEW Special Edition 3

T H E S L O U G H I R E V I E W 0 5

THE STORY OF THE MYSTERIOUS ARTIST

Who was that Le Gras?

BY VAN OMMEN KLOEKE, in Onze Hond 1979 - THE NETHERLANDS
TRANSLATED FROM DUTCH BY ELS SIEBEL - THE NETHERLANDS

The dream etching

I first met it in 1935. I found it in the book
“Our Dogs” by P. M. C. Toepoel, published

just two years earlier. A book that, like the
then secretary of the Council of
Management, J. L. J. J. Harms, in his
preface, remarked, is “in its concise form a
useful and instructive work and would be of
interest to a large circle of dog lovers

precisely because of this brevity.”

After the extensive and costly standard
works that had been published beforehand, The dream etching of August Le Gras from 1900
Toepoel ushered in a new era by writing

the first general cynological book, which “August Le Gras, the painter of North
was affordable to everyone and by his Africa, was the friend of the sheiks, and
pleasant and often entertaining style received from them as a gift what is not for
necessitated reading and thus constituted sale, the noblest of their sighthounds. Le
an important advocacy for Cynology. Gras' Sloughis were famous in Europe and
how do we oldies look at that and I don't
The book is illustrated with photographs of know what of his beautiful Arabs.”

each breed being discussed. But I was
struck by the one exception to this, a I was 21 when I read this. Perhaps it was
beautiful drawing, which appears on page that age that made me dream of distant
175, with: “Sloughi, etching of the late August deserts, wild Tuaregs, beautiful Arabian
Le Gras”, underneath. The Sloughi is horses and now also of those elegant,

rendered so flawlessly in detail that it could light-footed oriental sighthounds.
have been an extremely successful
illustration of the breed's standard. The drawing of Le Gras became my dream
etching. And I wondered: Who and what is
In the text section, Toepoel writes: that Le Gras? Is he a Frenchman or
perhaps a Dutchman? But I couldn't find
anything about him anywhere.