The man seated with the dogs is John Brown, the Queen’s personal servant and ghillie at Balmoral.
One can see what is obviously a smooth dachshund on the far left and a fox terrier cross on the far right. If it’s a pure fox terrier, it’s undocked.
The two retrieverish looking dogs are collies.
Yes. Queen Victoria preferred a kind of collie that was normally drop-eared and either predominantly black or black-and-tan in color, which was very common in certain collie populations near the border with England and Scotland.
One can also see how dogs like these would have played a role in developing the Gordon setter, which is well-known to have some collie blood– and this fact has been confirmed in a recent genomic study.
Advertisement
I would like to note that in my extensive google-fu of this issue, I have NEVER ONCE found a dog that looks like a Rought/Smooth collie being pictured with Queen Victoria or John Brown. It’s possible, she did own a lot of collies. Many of them are BC looking, several are rather English Shepherd looking, and even some all white ones that are frankly kind of Spitz-ish. But no Lassie Collies that I’ve found.
Her successor, Edward, however, has paintings and such with clearly sable Collies that are certainly NOT Border Collie in type at all, that look much more like OTFS, Collies, and even Borzois.
I actually love the look of these two collies, they are quite handsome, a tad unrefined, nice mane-ruffs and tails, short and trim along the body, retriever-ish heads and cute tag ears.
Really they could pass for very large Tollers.
Chris- I really enjoyed that series of pictures you posted of Queen Victoria’s dogs. You can really see how close she and Sharp were – he’s just melting into her.
Compared to modern dogs, they resemble English shepherds more than anything else. It looks like they have brindling on their tan points, though that may just be my 7″ screen.