Man’s best friend has always held a special place in the hearts of artists.Veronese painted dogs into his large banquet scenes, Rosa Bonheur produced touching canine portraits — and where would William Wegman be without weimaraners?

At the Bruce Museum, dogs are the pretext for “Best in the Show,” a fascinating selection of nearly threedozen artworks ranging from the Baroque to the postmodern. Dog lovers will immediately understand Louis XIV’s urge to immortalize his handsome hunting hound Tane in 1702, or Sir Owen Williams’s commissioning in 1828 of a portrait of Jocko, a peppy fox terrier.

But other visitors will also have much to appreciate. The paintings show the dog’s role evolving from hunter’s accessory to pampered royal ornament, and from scrounging street mutt to object of postmodernist irony. All presented the artist with a chance to show off qualities of fur, whether matted and woolly, or iridescently gleaming over rippled sinews. Canine bodies also lent themselves naturally to narrative rhythms, embodying a gesture — “they went thataway” — with a genuineness humans could only envy. As it turns out, Tiepolo, Gericault, and Gainsborough painted dogs with no less intensity than other subjects.

Greeting visitors at the exhibition’s entrance is the jewel-like “A Sleeping Dog beside a Terracotta Jug, a Basket, and a Pile of Kindling Wood” (1650) by Gerrit Dou, one of Rembrandt’s most gifted students. In this tiny panel, exquisitely detailed surfaces of fur, ceramic, and wicker seem to glow from within.

There follow vivid genre scenes such as Frans Snyders’s “Two Dogs and a Cat in a Kitchen” (c. 1630-35), which pictures a frantic fight over an unguarded meal. More affecting, though, are simpler portraits like Tiepolo’s “Portrait of the Spaniel of the Infanta Maria Josefa de Bourbon” (c. 1763). Tiepolo sometimes seems like a lightweight Veronese, but here his soberly radiant pinks and greens have true gravitas. Precise modeling and lustrous color give George Stubbs’s “Brown and White Norfolk or Water Spaniel” (1778) a sturdy exuberance, while Theodore Gericault’s “Head of a Bulldog” (c. 1817–18) is the incarnation of nervous energy.

Some paintings foretell later trends. The agile spaniel playing the piano in Philip Reinagle’s “Portrait of an Extraordinary Musical Dog” (1805) anticipates Mr. Wegman’s footloose humor. Two years before his death, the academician Jean-Leon Gerome let down his hair to paint his wacky “Optician’s Sign” (1902). This painting, with its punning wordplay, monocle-sporting terrier, and real, attached binoculars would be at home in MoMA’s Dada exhibition.

One of the exhibition’s highlights, Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s “Dog With Bowl” (c. 1751), engages the viewer’s space with its shaped format and a mantle-like frame that physically projects from the wall. The artist applied a shadow to the painted dog, as if cast by the three-dimensional frame. All this would be mere trickery were it not for Oudry’s subtle tones, which beautifully illuminate the scenario of dog, bowl, and floor.

The exhibition wraps up with several modern pieces, including David Hockney’s colorful “Dog Painting 22” (1995), a double portrait of sleeping dachshunds; Andy Warhol’s hieratic cocker spaniel titled “Ginger” (1976); Duane Hanson’s hyperrealistic sculpture “Beagle in a Basket” (1981), and William Wegman’s “‘Grandmother,’ she said, ‘you look different'”(1993), which features you-know-who as Little Red Riding Hood.

“Best in the Show” was organized by the Bruce Museum in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the exhibition opens in October. Be sure to bring your cell phone to the Bruce; you can dial 408-794-2808 for a free audio tour while strolling through the show — or, for that matter, while waiting for the bus, or taking your own four-legged friend for the evening constitutional.

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So many of Michael Werner’s artists — Georg Baselitz, Jorg Immendorff, Markus Lupertz, A.R. Penck, and Sigmar Polke — are German natives that one expects a gallery group show to seethe with conflictions about national identity, politics, and art itself. As it happens, “Black and White” is relatively well-mannered, perhaps because the 10 gallery artists are restricted to smallish, mostly uncolored drawings.

Individual personalities, however, are still evident. Based on Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” Mr. Immendorff’s two pencil drawings have the same dense, charged modeling and narratives of his huge canvases. In “I Drove All Night” (1995), the artist depicts himself on the way to Bedlam, the insane asylum; the other, untitled drawing (1993) fancifully caricatures a prostitute. Nearby, an untitled 1985 abstraction by Don Van Vliet — Captain Beefheart, to music fans — is a marvel of compact vigor, with a central massing of strokes leveraged by quick diagonals.

Mr. Lupertz’s untitled, masklike head (1993) relates to his series of large, expressionist paintings and sculptures inspired by Wagner’s “Parsifal.” One of Mr. Penck’s familiar stick figure drawings (undated and untitled) is on view, but more remarkable is his untitled sheet of figure studies (1977), to which vigorous marks and rich tones lend a complex depth.

Other works are more ambiguous. Mr. Polke’s two untitled, mixed media abstractions (both 2002) combine evocative techniques — sprayed paint, washes, brushstrokes, halftone screen textures — in somewhat inconclusive designs. (His untitled 1966 gouache of a figure resting, head on arms, is poignantly direct.) The late James Lee Byars’s diagrams in gold ink on black paper are coyly enigmatic. Per Kirkeby’s landscape-like images are often inscrutable, but the disjointed forms in two 1983 drawings titled “Laeso” (after a Danish island) are downright indecipherable.

By comparison, Peter Doig’s strange, dark, untitled landscape (2003), and several romantically atmospheric nudes by the late Frenchman Eugene Leroy are refreshingly forthright. All too explicit, for some viewers, will be Baselitz’s graphically sexual “Geschlecht mit Klossen” (1963).

“Best in the Show” until August 27 (1 Museum Drive, Greenwich, Conn., 203-869-0376).

“Black and White” until September 9 (4 E. 77th St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-988-1623). Price range: Gallery declined to disclose prices.