The heritage collection · RA.1931.1
The Sleeping Hound
A greyhound asleep on a velvet cushion at the foot of the main stair. It breathes, and when it dreams its forepaw twitches.
1931
The Sleeping Hound was begun in the winter of 1929–30, the first winter of the Depression, when the house had almost no commissions and kept its makers at the bench by setting them a piece of its own. It took them until the spring of 1931. Rosalind Hayes, the natural history preparator among the founders, modeled it on a greyhound that slept every afternoon on the steps of a bakery on Queen Anne Avenue.
It breathes at fourteen breaths a minute, slower than a waking dog and exactly as fast as a sleeping one, by means of a leather bellows beneath its ribs worked from a slowly turning cam. Every thirteen minutes or so, at an interval that varies by a few seconds so that nobody can anticipate it, the right forepaw twitches as if the hound were dreaming of running.
It has lain at the foot of the main stair of the House since 1931. Visitors lower their voices as they pass it. Staff do too.
Object record
- Object type
- Breathing figure of a sleeping dog
- Made
- The House, Seattle, 1929–1931
- Makers
- Rosalind Hayes, figure; Matthias Oberle, bellows; Tobias Rosen, movement
- Materials and techniques
- Carved lime, gesso, short-haired kid, leather, brass; velvet cushion
- Dimensions
- 96 cm long, curled
- Gallery label
- “Please let him sleep.”
- Accession number
- RA.1931.1
- Certificate of provenance
- No. 506
- Location
- The House, Seattle. Shown on any visit
- Record
- Cataloged 1952; revised 2026
Records in the heritage catalog are compiled from the Register of Provenance and the makers’ own notebooks. Where the two disagree, the Register is preferred and the disagreement noted. Return to the collection