Celebrity Pets

George Clooney is not one for long-term relationships. But what’s remained beyond the grasp of any woman to date was no problem for the pot-bellied pig Max: before it died in 2006, Max had spent 18 years at the side of the “Sexiest Man Alive.” Even half a century ago, the photographer Edward Quinn recognised that the relationship between stars and their pets is a special one. On the Cote d’Azur — the Mecca of the 1950s and 1960s jet set — he managed to create some of his most personal celebrity portraits in the presence of their pets. Often shy and always on guard against fair-weather friends, our glimpses of stars in Celebrity Pets alongside their animal companions are unusually approachable and natural: Picasso romping around with his dogs, Kabul and Lump, or the writer Somerset Maugham on all fours, face to face with his Pekingese, Chin. And we see the mongrel Guapa in a situation that every man of the world would have dreamed of: in bed with Brigitte Bardot.

Text in English, German and French.