oh to be a pup being painted - by William Henry Hamilton Trood (1848-1899). 

You know he watched this happen and laughed his ass off and went, “people need to see this.”

If you look closely you can see the letters “SCHWEP…” on the label of the bottle the puppies are messing with. That gave me a clue and I found that the pictures, “Uncorking the Bottle” and “A Surprising Result” were painted as advertising for the Schweppes soft drink company. Schweppes was the first company to sell bottled soda water. Johan Jacob Schweppe from Geneva developed a process to artificially carbonate water (there are naturally fizzy mineral water springs, but carbonation made manufacturing possible) and started a business. Initially he couldn’t seal the bottles tightly enough to stop the CO2 gas gradually escaping. You may notice the odd shape of the bottle, with a rounded bottom that it couldn’t stand up on - this was a compromise until a better solution could be found, because if the bottle was stored on its side then any rising gas would be trapped as a bubble against the glass and would not be able to seep out around the cork (watertight but not quite airtight). The fact that Schweppes soda water stayed fizzy was a selling point, hence advertising art like this which promised to knock your dogs’ socks off with its powerful effervescence.

So unfortunately this is not a spontaneous vignette, but now you know some soda pop history and that’s always worthwhile.

oh to be a pup being painted - by William Henry Hamilton Trood (1848-1899). 

You know he watched this happen and laughed his ass off and went, “people need to see this.”