If you remember anything about this painting, may it be that the dog's name is Noble. The black poodle in the bottom left greets us as a silhouette with a few shiny parts: teeth, eye, damp nose, pink tongue. The teeth could crack bone; the tongue wants to be friends. Not a very dignified pose for a creature called Noble, but humans love to saddle animals with teasingly grand names-Rex, Princess, King, Queenie.
The man girthily looming over Noble is not a noble. You might be able to tell by his coat, which blends into the blackness as easily as his pet's fur. But his hands are the bigger giveaway-he's no manual laborer, yet you sense that he uses them all the time. They speak every language, know classical rhetoric and differential calculus, have interesting opinions about the Berlin Conference.
To celebrate his talent for persuading people to buy expensive objects, he has hired the famous John Singer Sargent and done what nobles do: converted himself into an expensive object. What does Asher Wertheimer think about all this? He's too smart to miss the ironies of an art dealer made art, but whether they taste sweet or bitter he won't say.
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