BRITON RIVIÉRE painted this scene, Compulsory Education, in 1887. Here is an interesting description of the painter’s portraits of animals from the website, Victorian/Edwardian Painting.  Phillip Brown writes:

Regarded as the most able successor to the great painter of animals Sir Edwin Landseer, Briton Riviére’s art was highly popular in the later nineteenth century when he exhibited sensitive portrayals of animals and human figures in which the beasts emphasise the portrayals of human emotion. Perhaps his most famous work is Prisoners also known as Fidelity of 1869 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) in which a young poacher and his dog await trial in a bare prison cell. The sympathy of the faithful dog for his master caught the imagination of the Victorian public and it was a similar appeal to that of Landseer’s Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner (Victoria and Albert Museum). Riviére’s biographer Walter Armstrong has described the artist’s ability to depict emotion in the expressions of his animals without overly anthropomorphising them; ‘Speaking of him broadly as an artist, Riviére’s strong points are his sympathy with animals, his pleasant sense of colour, his directness of conception, and his fine vein of poetry.”

The most successful of Riviére’s compositions are those in which a solitary human figure is shown with a dog.

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