Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912 Giacomo Balla (1871-1958)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Giacomo Balla also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.

The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A diminutive dachshund skitters briskly across a pale, plank-like ground, its sinuous body multiplied in flickering increments, each paw, ear, and exuberant tail plume echoed as if captured in successive frames of an early film. Only the lower hem of its handler’s dark, flounced skirt and the splayed tips of stylish shoes intrude into the upper field, while the leash whips and loops in a lattice of silvery arcs. The cropping is abrupt, withholding identities yet intensifying the sense of a moment snatched mid-stride - an everyday vignette distilled into pure velocity.

The palette is deliberately restrained. Against the almost bleached floor - streaked ribbons of lilac-grey tinged with muted green and pink - the ebony of dog and dress reads as a single silhouette cleaved by light. This high contrast allows the embedded repetitions to glow: the leash glints chalky white, the dog’s phantom paws bloom in mauve and smoke, and faint olive shadows suggest the dusty Tuscan air noted by contemporary accounts. Colour here is not descriptive so much as energetic, animating the scene with a soft but insistent vibration.

Balla’s technique fuses Divisionist micro-strokes with Futurist seriality. Thin, quick touches articulate translucent overlays, their rhythmic spacing evoking photographic plates exposed in rapid sequence. The surface remains remarkably even; nothing of impasto distracts from the optical flutter. Paint becomes a vehicle for temporal notation, each mark recording a fractional displacement rather than a static contour.

Compositionally, the eye is swept along two vectors. The leash’s arc pulls upward and rightward, while the diagonal grain of the ground slides leftward, establishing a counter-current that heightens momentum. The dog’s repeated tail feathers form a centrifugal fan, anchoring the lower right, and Balla slyly signs and dates the canvas on that same tilt, folding his authorship into the choreography. Negative space is disciplined, leaving no extraneous incident to slow the pulse.

Executed in 1912, the work exemplifies the Futurists’ credo that “all things move”. Yet Balla’s subject is pointedly humble. By applying avant-garde strategies to a domestic promenade, he demonstrates that modernity’s dynamism permeates even the most ordinary gestures. The painting thus becomes an essay on perception itself, urging viewers to register the invisible intervals that knit experience together.

What endures is not merely a clever optical trick but a meditation on attention. Velocity is rendered intimate, almost tender, reminding us that the rush of the new century could be glimpsed in the brisk patter of a small dog just as surely as in the roar of machines.