Striking the pose of a child on a museum outing of his parents’ choosing, a 4-year-old bloodhound named Knotty stretched out on a bench and ignored the walls full of paintings of dogs.

The repeated scenes of hunts, open fields, and kennels hundreds of times over, filling entire rooms at the New York office of the auction house Bonhams. Not one of the show dogs in attendance so much as wagged a tail.

There is, it seems, a perfectly logical explanation for why some of today’s top dogs refuse even to sniff at the pictures of past generations of canine champions. “They don’t recognize flat objects as such,” the New York director of the fine art department at the auction house, Alan Fausel, said with a leashed dog in tow.

Bonhams has been holding auctions devoted exclusively to dog art for more than 20 years. The auction house Doyle New York also hosted a preview yesterday for a similar sale, and a gallery specializing in dog paintings, the William Secord Gallery on East 76th Street, also was open for the owners and pets arriving in town for the country’s most famous dog show.

As snow fell on the dog-scarce streets of Manhattan, the talk at Bonhams was mostly about the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden, which begins tonight.

Knotty, labeled by its breeder as the most winning bloodhound in history, would have made a painter’s job easy as he sat motionless. Other dogs are known to have put painters through great pains to convince them to sit still and pose.

In 1898 when John Emms painted his “New Forest Foxhounds” – which Bonhams valued at between $800,000 and $1.2 million – the artist walked each of the 13 foxhounds in the artwork three miles from their kennel to his studio, Mr. O’Brien said. The painter worked from these sketches to put together his final work, which is more than five feet long. That painting is the centerpiece of Bonhams’ auction scheduled for Tuesday.

Prospective buyers on the trail of a bargain were mostly interested in paintings depicting their dog’s breed.

“I have a breed that is ostensibly an old breed, a Dalmatian, but is poorly represented in the art of the time,” said Michele Markoff, of Virginia, who did not find a single Dalmatian’s image among the 251 lots on display at Bonhams. Ms. Markoff, a breeder of champion Dalmatians, has sought paintings of Dalmatians trotting along horse carriages and guarding rural way stations at auctions in America and abroad.

“You never know where you’ll find them,” Ms. Markoff said. “You look wherever they may be.” Others were not even considering a bid. Despite her devotion to animals, Knotty’s owner, Lyn Sherman, of Topanga, Calif., is not a collector of dog art. “I haven’t because most of my discretionary funds go to flying the dog around the county,” Ms. Sherman, who plans to retire Knotty in the coming months, said.