Neel's portrayal of animals in her work was varied. In some paintings they were presented in conjunction with a person in a portrait, other times as a vignette of daily life, sometimes they were rendered from memory and occasionally they were presented as an actual, very individual portrait.

In many of these works a human figure is seen with a dog or cat in double portraits that convey a sense of the bond between human and animal. Eddie Zuckermandel and the Cat shows the titular subject seated behind a table, a small Siamese cat in his lap. The two characters are lit from above, casting their faces in a similar deep triangular shadow. In Carol and the Dog, the blonde hair, fair skin and pale green dress of the woman contrast with the black fur and deep red eyes of the poodle by her side. In her painting of Lushka, 1974, the dog is clearly the subject of what we would actually call a portrait.  Like her paintings of people, Neel presents the dog in a frontal position, looking straight at the artist and the viewer.

In contrast with these studies from life, Nadya and the Wolf and Lushka, 1970 have a more enigmatic quality, in which the sitters appear to be taking part in an ambiguous mythological or metaphorical scenario.

Neel's animals can be seen as human companions, but equally they are characters in their own right, as colourful and specific as the people portrayed by the artist. This exhibition represents a cross-section of this fascinating and diverse body of work.