Two shepherd boys react as a black dog and a reddish-tan dog fight at their feet, and one boy raises a stick. Thomas Gainsborough painted the scene in 1783 on a canvas the size of a full-length portrait, and at that year's Royal Academy exhibition it hung “on the line” in the Great Room, so the dogs snapped and growled just above the visitors' heads. The Whitehall Evening-Post judged it one of the best, “if not the very best picture in the room.” Gainsborough wrote wryly to the Academy's treasurer, Sir William Chambers, “I sent my fighting dogs to divert you,” joking that next time he would paint the boys fighting and the dogs looking on. That next time never came: after a long history of disputes over the hanging of his pictures, 1783 was the last time he showed at the Academy. It is at Kenwood House in London (English Heritage).