Not old news, as Selena said! Though as soon as I saw it, I thought, wait a minute, I've read about this painting. Fritz's name on the collar especially rang a bell.

Turns out it was mentioned in this dog letter article I turned up at the very beginning of our salon, over a year ago.

Biche was also painted in her own right [i.e. not just on the Sanssouci murals] by Antoine Pesne, with her collar, clearly identifying her as a royal dog, owned by ‘the Great’ Frederick.

It does look like Solange wir zu zweit sind is their source for at least some of the claims in the article, so probably this one as well. I note that they use one of the posthumous bios with the "Alcmene shared his vault" anecdote that we are highly suspicious of and think was probably a misunderstanding (actually, now that I remember, this article is where I got that idea and put it in my first posted Fritzian fic--so yeah, I read this article a *long* time ago.)

Frederick had Biche painted similarly, into the lap of the goddess Diana, in Sanssouci’s intimate Concert Room. Biche in fact, died in the Concert Room

Aww! If that's true, I didn't know she'd died there. :(

Thank you for sharing this picture, and also the Dresden letter!