As Barraud later wrote in an article for The Strand magazine: “The manager, Mr Barry Owen asked me if the picture was for sale and if I could introduce a machine of their own make, a Gramophone, instead of the one in the picture. I replied that the picture was for sale and that I could make the alteration if they would let me have an instrument to paint from.”
Nipper died in September 1895, having returned from Liverpool to live with Mark Barrauds widow in Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey, England. Though not a thoroughbred, Nipper had plenty of bull terrier in him; he never hesitated to take on another dog in a fight, loved chasing rats and had a fondness for the pheasants in Richmond Park!
In Liverpool Nipper discovered the Phonograph, a cylinder recording and playing machine and Francis Barraud “often noticed how puzzled he was to make out where the voice came from”. This scene must have been indelibly printed in Barrauds brain, for it was three years after Nipper died that he committed it to canvas.
On 15 September 1899, The Gramophone Company sent Barraud a letter making him a formal offer for the picture, which he immediately accepted. He was paid £50 for the painting and a further £50 for the full copyright. The deal was finally confirmed on 4 October 1899 when a representative from The Gramophone Company saw the amended painting for the first time.
Barraud was given the advise to repaint the horn from black to gold, as this might better his opportunity for a sale. With this in mind, in the summer of 1899 he visited 31 Maiden Lane, home of the newly formed Gramophone Company, with a photograph of his painting and a request to borrow a brass horn.
Just as the gramophone replaced the phonograph in the painting of “His Master’s Voice,” so did it dominate and then replace the phonograph in reality, the last phonograph cylinder being printed in 1929, 52 years after Edison first recorded “Mary had a little lamb” on his revolutionary machine. Records finally gave way to cassettes in the 80s, and cassettes succumbed to the CD juggernaut in the 90s. Now CDs themselves are doing battle with the almighty Internet, the source of the vast majority of my own music consumption, on services like Spotify, Pandora, Grooveshark, and my current addiction, ThisIsMyJam.com, a social site where music obsessives of all kinds can share their favorite music one song at a time. Just last month, in May of 2012, it was announced that for the first time ever in the U.K., digital downloads surpassed CD sales, and it’s just a matter of time before the same mark is reached in the U.S. Meanwhile, the HMV entertainment store chain in Britain, expanding worldwide a little over ten years ago with over 300 stores internationally, now finds itself closing stores and struggling to eke out an annual profit.
Still, besides appearing in a couple of pieces of advertising literature, nothing much happened with “His Master’s Voice” for the next few months. Then, in May of 1899, Emile Berliner, the German-born American inventor who had invented both the gramophone and the disc record and had founded the Gramophone Company, was visiting the company’s London offices. He noticed the painting of Nipper hanging in Owen’s office and responded to it at once.
As a kid I’d simply assumed Nipper was a fictional creation, no more real than Tony the Tiger or the Keebler elves. And since it wasn’t possible for anyone not in a recording studio to capture their voice on an LP, the idea that he was listening to his actual master’s voice didn’t compute, so I took it as given that the phrase “His Master’s Voice” was just a metaphorical suggestion of RCA Victor’s fine sound quality. The final confirmation that Nipper was a complete invention, dreamed up by RCA Victor in some dusty, long ago yesteryear, was the fact that I had never, ever seen any of the family collies stop and listen to anything being played through the big, boxy living room speakers.
As a kid I was obsessed with music, and I listened indiscriminately to anything and everything on the family record player. Since my brothers were all much older I had a lot to choose from. Two brothers maintained the rock collection: Pink Floyd, Boston, The Clash, Elton John—whose parade of loose lesbians on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road filled my pre-adolescent brain with all manner of troubling fantasy. My second eldest brother, still in the closet and preparing for an (ultimately unrealized) future in the priesthood, was busy checking off a major box on the gay cliché checklist by building up what had to have been the most comprehensive collection of Barbra Streisand albums in Northern Minnesota. I listened to them all, from her years belting out Broadway and jazz standards (amazing) to her disco ‘70s output complete with Jewfro (oy).
After Nipper died in 1895, Francis fondly recalled this endearing habit of Nipper’s. He was suddenly struck with the idea that it would make a fascinating—as well as commercially rewarding—subject for a painting, and settled on a title: “His Master’s Voice.” He would later claim, “It certainly was the happiest thought I ever had.”
Amusing archival footage from the EMI Archive Trust shows a dog that looks like Nipper, from the 1898 Francis Barraud, painting “His Master’s Voice”, getting a bit frisky in front of the gramophone that made him famous.
As it turns out, Nipper had died in 1895, several years before the painting was even made and this dog was very similar in looks.
It was only when the was sold to The Gramophone Company Ltd. that a couple of engineers decided to film a dog and gramophone together.