Kennel Club exhibition highlights the plight of vulnerable spaniel breeds

Melody Fisher photographs for 'Minority Spaniels'

'Two Clumbers Charging Through Lavender' by Melody Fisher.

(Image credit: Melody Fisher)

By Annunciata Elwes

published 15 April 2025

in Features

A few weeks ago we shed a much-needed light on Britain's at risk native dog breeds. And now, we're going full spaniel.

Over the past year, photographer Melody Fisher has been travelling the UK taking photographs of ‘vulnerable’ spaniel breeds with declining registration numbers, such as clumber, field, Sussex, Welsh springer and Spanish water spaniels. Her exhibition Minority Spaniels opened last week at The Kennel Club Art Gallery, 10, Clarges Street in Mayfair, showcasing the dogs’ skills both in the field and in the show ring.

Also pictured is the curly-coated Lagotto Romagnolo (above), searches for which surged by 723% within three days after the King was given a Lagotto puppy, named Snuff, in February. ‘With numbers in decline, I hope this exhibition highlights their remarkable attributes and encourages more people to discover these wonderful breeds,’ says Fisher. ‘One of my favourite photos from the Minority Spaniels capsule exhibition is the Two Clumbers Charging Through The Lavender — it has a sense of play and light-heartedness, yet captures beautifully the colours and composition of the dogs in the purple colours,’ comments Heidi Hudson, the KC’s curator of photographic collections.

Minority Spaniels runs to June 27 and the KC Art Gallery is open by appointment only; email art.gallery@thekennelclub.org.uk or telephone 020–7518 1064.

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

Sign up for the Country Life Newsletter