While visiting my cousin Eva in South Dartmouth, Mass, I met Dedee Shattuck who invited us (that’d be me and Chico) to come see her eponymous gallery, the Dedee Shattuck Gallery, in Westport, MA.

Just starting their second year in business, the season’s opening show was photographic prints by Sebastian Lassalle, many of them made from large format negatives. The images are deliciously detailed, composed like paintings, and, for a moment or two, I flirted with the idea of buying one them. Then I realized that I’d have to abandon some of my existing art to have a place to hang the photo, so I moved on from that idea and just appreciated the images.

The images were hung a bit too high for Chico to see, so I dropped the leash and let him enjoy the gallery his way. That was to go from corner to corner, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Then I posed him for this picture:

Doesn't Chico look great on this hand-crafted bench?

Chico was a perfect gallery visitor: he didn’t say a word when other patrons came into the gallery (the old Chico would have run at them barking), he waited patiently for me to do my looking around, when he was invited to he greeted strangers with a wag of the tail, he accepted petting from strangers. To my mind, this outing was a complete success.