Landseer wrote in a letter in 1864 that he found Boz ‘a charming subject’ and claimed to ‘like it better than any dog I ever had the honor to paint for Her Majesty’. Queen Victoria, however, was disappointed with the picture and sent Landseer a photograph of the old dog to help him. The artist made the dog a little shorter and altered the background.

The name 'Boz' was presumably taken from the the pen-name which Charles Dickens used for his earliest set of short stories, 'Sketches by "Boz"', 1836.