At a young age, and while studying drawing at night, William Dobell found his first job as a ‘dog-walloper’. His duties in this job were to keep dogs from ruining shop display windows, by chasing them away.

As an artist who left school at the age of 14 to forge his own path, this interaction with man’s best friend grew as did his practice. In this intimate set of photographs loaned from the AGNSW Archive Collection, we see a snippet of Dobell in his homelife, the artist with his dogs in Lake Macquarie.