Andy Warhol was born in 1928 in Pennsylvania. In 1949, shortly after Graduating from the Carnegie Institute for Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, the artist moved to New York. He began to gain recognition as a commercial artist in the 1950s, and sprang into notoriety in 1962 due to his paintings of Campbell soup cans. By 1963, Warhol was primarily using silk-screening to mass-produce paintings of mundane household objects to mimic and mock consumerism and material culture. The artist continued to use this technique to render various subject matters.

In the 1970s, Warhol’s interest in dogs grew as he became the owner of a shorthaired dachshund named Archie, and a few years later, Amos. In 1976, Peter Grant commissioned Warhol to paint his cocker spaniel named Ginger. Warhol produced two paintings and one drawing of Ginger. Grant, thrilled with the outcome, had suggested Warhol do a whole series of cats and dogs. And the artist did just that.

Warhol worked from photographs to create his paintings. However, cats and dogs, not known for their ability to sit still when required, did not make for the best of models; thus, Warhol included taxidermied animals as the subjects of some of the works in his series. Cecil, of the painting Cats and Dogs (Cecil), 1976, was one such example.

A collector of taxidermy, Warhol purchased the stuffed Great Dane from an antique dealer in the late 1960s, who claimed that the dog had belonged to Hollywood movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille, after whom the dog was named. In actuality, the dog was once named Ador Tipp Topp. Having won many competitions, including a blue ribbon in Westminster, the dog was stuffed upon passing and became part of the Dog Hall of Fame at Yale University's Peabody Museum. The museum closed in 1964 its collection moved into storage or sold. Ador Tipp Topp’s fate was the latter; he was sold for about 10 dollars to some students at Yale. Eventually he found his way to the antique dealer that would go on to sell him to Andy Warhol under the claim that the dog had once belonged to Cecil B. DeMille. From 1969 to 1987, Cecil stood guard at the entrance of The Factory, Andy Warhol’s New York studio.