Nipper - real or fake

[ppppenguin]

Is this animated GIF from real vintage cine footage or some kind of modern fake? I've no idea.

https://giphy.com/gifs/nipper-kzyBS23xdC...baPIzY9_Ao

[pwdrive]

The subject lighting looks remarkably constant.

Lawrence.

[BusyBee]

I have a feeling that I have seen either it, or something similar before.

It looks realistic for the behaviour of a dog when there is irritating sound coming from the horn. It reminds me of how a dog we had when I was little (Jack Russel) would, and in some cases did, behave. You should have seen it race after my brother's Scalextric cars and jump when getting shocks off the track conductors (luckily not harmful). A tongue on a battery had nothing on that. He loved to join in though.

Tracy

[peter scott]

The full video looks convincing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WJEbbWVosw

[Mike Watterson]

I think I read the dog was already dead when the original phonograph version of the painting was done. The artist used a B&W photo. Edison wasn't interested. It was repainted as a gramophone.

I think a cine recording of Nipper isn't impossible, but very unlikely. It would have to have been before 1898 because my understanding is that Nipper was dead by then.

The original painting was an oil on canvas by Francis Barraud in 1898. Barraud's deceased brother, a London photographer, willed him his estate including his DC-powered Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph with a case of cylinders and his dog Nipper. Barraud's original painting depicts Nipper staring intently into the horn of an Edison-Bell while both sit on a polished wooden surface. The horn on the Edison-Bell machine was black and after a failed attempt at selling the painting to a cylinder record supplier of Edison Phonographs in the UK, a friend of Barraud's suggested that the painting could be brightened up (and possibly made more marketable) by substituting one of the brass-belled horns on display in the window at the new gramophone shop on Maiden Lane. The Gramophone Company in London, was founded and managed by an American, William Barry Owen. Barraud paid a visit with a photograph of the painting and asked to borrow a horn. Owen gave Barraud an entire gramophone and asked him to paint it into the picture, offering to buy the result. On close inspection, the original painting still shows the contours of the Edison-Bell phonograph beneath the paint of the gramophone.[1] Dozens of copies of "His Master's Voice" were painted by Barraud, several of them commissioned for executives of the Gramophone Company and Victor, though Barraud apparently would paint copies for anybody who paid him for one. The original painting is in the archives of EMI Records (successor to the Gramophone company in the UK), now owned by Universal Music Group.

Wikipedia

EDIT:
Actually Wikipedia says Nipper died in 1895.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipper

In 1898, three years after Nipper's death, Francis Barraud, his last owner and brother of his first owner, painted a picture of Nipper listening intently to a wind-up Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph. Thinking the Edison-Bell Company located in New Jersey, USA,[5] might find it useful, he presented it to James E. Hough, who promptly said, "Dogs don't listen to phonographs". On 31 May 1899, Barraud went to the Maiden Lane offices of The Gramophone Company with the intention of borrowing a brass horn to replace the original black horn on the painting. Manager William Barry Owen suggested that if the artist replaced the machine with a Berliner disc gramophone, that he would buy the painting. The image became the successful trademark of the Victor and HMV record labels, HMV music stores, and the Radio Corporation of America, after the acquisition of the Victor company in 1929. The trademark was registered by Berliner for use in the United States on 10 July 1900.[9] (See His Master's Voice for a complete history of the brands based on Nipper.)

So I call fake, because though the Gramophone existed in the USA before 1985, it wasn't in the UK till 1898. Francis Barraud didn't even have the kind of Gramophone in the faked film till 1899, four years after Nipper's death.

[ppppenguin]

But not a modern fake.

c1985 when I was working at Thorn-EMI CRL I visited the HMV/EMI archive. It used to be run by a lovely lady called Ruth Edge. I was allowed to handle THE gramophone. I was also allowed to look though the files - the one about Caruso was huge and seemed to be mainly about money disputes. While Ruth Edge was a lovely archivist her trust in people was horribly abused. A few years after I was there, the son of a well respected historian, musicologist and restorer of recordings stole material from the EMI archive and sold it in Japan. Access was much reduced after that. I'll name no names but those of you in the BVWS at the time may well have read or heard about the incident.

[peter scott]

I wonder if he is here repainting the image with the gramophone instead of the phonograph. It's a pity the photo doesn't show more to the left.

   

Peter

[roadster]

The two people credited in the title both worked in the sound recording industry: Birnbaum, British, was 35 years old in 1900 and Darby, a 22yr old American, arrived in Bremen in 1899 on the ss Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse (an interesting vessel: being the first "superliner", with four funnels), so could well have been in Britain in 1900. The dog appears not to be the original Nipper The dog in the film has a black left side face but the Nipper in the painting does not, but how many different Lassies starred in the films! So, quite likely a period recreation.