Man’s best friend—three notable words used to describe the beautiful bond between humans and dogs. This new exhibition at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay displays 19th-century works in which dogs are not just their happy selves but symbols that bring other levels of meaning to the painting. In art of the 1800s, dogs represented loyalty and domesticity, lasciviousness and exoticism. Aristocrats liked to pose with their dogs, a tradition that underlined the idea of bloodlines and pedigree—the more exotic the breed, the more impressive! And artists cleverly used dogs to enhance emotion in their paintings, letting canines offer clues to mood and feeling. True to what it puts on its walls, the Musée d’Orsay welcomes guide and assistance dogs into the museum. —Isabella Carter