Nipper

Nipper ( – September 1895¹) was a dog from England. He is best known as the subject of His Master's Voice (1898), painted posthumously by his second owner, Francis Barraud. The painting became an international entertainment trademark, with Nipper's likeness used across record labels, consumer electronics and entertainment retail.

Nipper ( – September 1895) was a dog from England. He is best known as the subject of His Master's Voice (1898), painted posthumously by his second owner, Francis Barraud. The painting became an international entertainment trademark, with Nipper's likeness used across record labels, consumer electronics and entertainment retail. ==Life== Nipper was born in 1884¹ in Bristol, England, and died in September 1895. He was likely a mixed-breed dog, although most early sources suggest that he was a Smooth Fox Terrier, or perhaps a Jack Russell Terrier, or possibly "part Bull Terrier". He was named Nipper because he would often "nip" at the backs of visitors' legs. Nipper originally lived with his owner, Mark Henry Barraud, in the Prince's Theatre where Barraud was a scenery designer. When Barraud died in 1887¹, his brothers Philip and Francis took care of the dog, then Francis took Nipper to Liverpool, and later to Mark's widow in Kingston upon Thames, London. Nipper died of natural causes in 1895 and was buried in Kingston upon Thames at Clarence Street, in a small park surrounded by magnolia trees. ==His Master's Voice== In 1898, three years after Nipper's death, Francis Barraud, the brother of Nipper's original owner, painted a picture of the dog listening intently to an Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph. He had recalled that Nipper had often appeared "puzzled ... to make out where the voice came from" when a phonograph was playing. Barraud worked from an old photo of Nipper. Thinking the Edison-Bell Company located in New Jersey, United States, might be interested in the painting, he offered it to James E. Hough, Edison-Bell's British representative, who promptly replied, "Dogs don't listen to phonographs". On 31 May 1899, Barraud visited the Maiden Lane offices of The Gramophone Company to inquire about borrowing a brass horn to replace the original black horn in order to brighten up the painting. When Gramophone Company founder and manager William Barry Owen was shown the painting, he suggested that if the artist painted out the cylinder machine and replaced it with a Berliner disc gramophone, he would buy the painting. Barraud gladly obliged and the phrase "His Master's Voice", along with the painting, was sold to The Gramophone Company for £100 ( ) – half for the copyright and half for the physical painting itself. The original oil painting hung in The Gramophone Company's headquarters, and then in EMI's boardroom in Hayes, Middlesex for many years. It appears that after the image was copyrighted, two employees of the Gramophone Company, William Sinkler Darby and Theodore Bernard Birnbaum, recorded a Mutoscope in 1900 entitled 'Nipper runs amok!'. A similar looking dog was used to act as Nipper. The Gramophone Company initially used Nipper's likeness on its gramophones but did not begin using the image on its record labels until 1909. The HMV retail shop used the trademark on its signage, beginning in 1921. Emile Berliner, creator of the disc gramophone, registered the trademark in the United States on 10 July 1900 and Berliner's business partner Eldridge Johnson began using the image in advertising for the recently created Consolidated Talking Machine Company which was reorganized in 1901 as the Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor). Johnson used Nipper and the gramophone extensively on Victor's products and advertising. The trademark was also utilized by Victor's Japanese division and remains in use by JVC. ===Statues=== A four-ton Nipper can be seen on the roof of the former RCA distribution building now owned by Arnoff Moving & Storage. The site is located at 991 Broadway in Albany, New York. A statue of Nipper was purchased by Jim Wells from RCA in Baltimore for $1, where it originally graced the former RCA Building on Russell Street. After spending many years on private property in Nipper Park in Merrifield, Virginia, perched over Lee Highway (U.S. Route 29), it has now been returned to Baltimore, Maryland. Nipper now sits atop the Maryland Historical Society building at Park Avenue and West Centre Street in Baltimore, and the statue now includes a gramophone. A small statue of Nipper in the United Kingdom can be seen perched above a doorway in the Merchant Venturers Building on the corner of Park Row and Woodland Road in Bristol; this building, part of the University of Bristol, stands near the site of the old Prince's Theatre. At Walt Disney World in Florida, a replication of Nipper with a gramophone appeared inside of a spaceship on the Space Mountain rollercoaster, and remained until the sponsorship from RCA to Walt Disney ended, upon which he was made into a robot dog and moved elsewhere within the queue. Various reproductions of Nipper can be found in the permanent exhibition of the in Montreal, Quebec, a museum dedicated to the work of Emile Berliner and his companies that Nipper was the mascot of. In May 2017, the City of Albany held a contest for various groups or artists to submit designs for creative, painted Nipper statues which were placed throughout the city. Ten of the contestants were chosen to create ten Nipper statues – which were displayed for one year and then auctioned off for charity. ==See also== List of individual dogs ==References== ===Citations=== ===Works cited=== RCA Building, Albany, NY Koenigsberg, Allen (June 2022). "Nipper's Arrival in the New World". Academia. Musée des ondes Emile Berliner

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