Richard with Dog, 1954, depicts the artist’s elder son, Richard (born 1939) a year after he had entered High Mowing School in Wilton, New Hampshire. A number of Neel’s paintings from this period feature her sons, Richard and Hartley, and occasionally their friends – and a sense of nascent adulthood, of boys becoming men, moving in their own direction, is palpable in these works. Writing about this painting in the catalogue for the exhibition Alice Neel: My Animals and Other Family, held at Victoria Miro in 2014, Kirsty Bell comments that ‘…in Richard with Dog, every inch of the canvas is densely worked, from the background foliage to the floral patterned shirt to her son’s defiant, tight-lipped stare. The unidentified dog peeking shyly and deferentially from the corner of the canvas is likewise a tight knot of brown, black and white.’ In relation to the verdant green that dominates the painting, Bell goes on to comment: ‘When temporarily removed from the urban rat race and the need for survival, Neel’s way of looking at the world shifts markedly in cadence. Here it can admit animals, plants and vibrant shades of green rather than the drab greys and mauves of the oppressive cityscapes she painted around this time, and the dark lines inscribed by experience on the faces of city dwellers…’