Famous pugs in history: Pompey and Trump

Part 1

Pompey and William the Silent

Pompey was the dog of William the Silent, the Prince of Orange. During a campaign against the Spanish, one night at Hermigny in France, assassins crept toward the sleeping prince's tent. Pompey had heard them and began barking and scratching to warn his master, finally jumping on his master's face to alert him to the danger. On the monument of William the Silent at the Church of St. Ursula in Delft, Pompey is carved lying at his master's feet.

You might wonder what breed Pompey actually was, and the honest answer is that people still disagree. Some sources describe Pompey as a relative of the pug, while others believe he was a Kooikerhondje. A U.S. court once referred to the dog as a spaniel. Hendrick de Keyser's terracotta model for the mortuary statue of William I, Prince of Orange, with Pompey is kept in the collection of the Rijksmuseum.

How the story is remembered

One account adds that the dog jumped on the prince's face to wake him. That same account says the prince declared Pompey, and the breed generally, the official dog of the House of Orange as thanks for the warning. A separate account of the same monument describes the dog there as the prince's spaniel rather than a pug.

Part 2

Trump and William Hogarth

Trump was a pug owned by the English painter William Hogarth. Hogarth included the dog in several works, including his 1745 self-portrait Painter and his Pug, held by the Tate Gallery. The Tate's own display caption says Hogarth's pug dog, Trump, serves as an emblem of the artist's own pugnacious character. Trump is called one of the most recognisable dogs in the history of art and has often stood in as a symbol for Hogarth himself.

Hogarth owned several pugs during his life. In December 1730, he placed an advertisement offering a reward for the return of a dog named Pugg. He likely acquired Trump soon afterward, in the early 1730s. Trump was approaching old age when Hogarth included him in the 1745 self-portrait, sitting beside the artist next to an easel bearing his symbolic line of beauty and works by Shakespeare, Swift, and Milton.

Trump's appearance and role in Hogarth's work

Trump looked quite different from today's pug. With his gangly legs and long muzzle, his appearance was quite unlike that of modern pugs, since he came from before the era of dog shows and set breed standards. One thing he did share with pugs you know today is that his ears were not cropped, which was out of step with the fashion of his time. Hogarth also included Trump in the 1746 portrait of Captain Lord George Graham in his Cabin, where the dog sits on a chair wearing Graham's wig and appears to be reading a sheet of music.

Hogarth's fondness for Trump became well known, and critics sometimes used the dog to mock the artist himself. In a 1763 engraving called The Bruiser, Hogarth reworked his 1745 self-portrait so that Trump urinates on a letter written by a critic who had attacked him. After Hogarth's death, plaster casts of a terracotta sculpture of Trump were sold with his possessions, and later potters reproduced the figure in porcelain and in Black Basalt ware. In 2001, a statue of Hogarth with Trump was unveiled near Hogarth's House, the artist's home from 1749 until his death in 1764.

Part 3

Why these stories still matter to pug owners

You do not need a pug to enjoy these stories, but if you have one, they add a little weight to your dog's history. Pugs became closely associated with the Netherlands and were often called Dutch dogs or Dutch mastiffs in Hogarth's time. Trump's name was itself an anglicised version of Tromp, shared by two famous Dutch admirals.

• Pompey is said to have saved William the Silent from assassins by barking and waking him.
• Pompey is carved at William the Silent's feet on his monument in Delft.
• Trump appeared in several of William Hogarth's paintings, most famously his 1745 self-portrait.
• A statue of Hogarth with Trump was unveiled in 2001 near Hogarth's House.