THE EMBLEM OF HMV is this dog – his name is Nipper – who was painted posthumously by his owner, Francis Barraud, in 1898. He called his painting His Master’s Voice and it was adopted as the trademark of The Gramophone Company in 1899. (Barraud had previously offered the painting to the Edison-Bell Company, who turned it down on the grounds that “dogs don’t listen to phonographs”.)
But what is Nipper sitting on? It’s a polished wood table, but it’s a curiously shape: its sides are clearly not parallel.
That’s because it isn’t a table. It’s a coffin. Francis Barraud, Victorian sentimentalist that he was, wanted to show that the sound reproduction from phonographs was so realistic (it wasn’t) that the dog, sitting on the coffin of his dead master, would recognise the voice.
