Famous Cat Oil Painting Reproductions

Why there is so little cat art

Here is the thing about cats in art history: there is not much of it, and the reason is not that nobody liked them. An animal painter is an artist who specializes in the portrayal of animals, and for most of the years covered by this catalog they got paid by people who owned horses and hunting dogs. A cat belonged to nobody. It had no market value, no breed papers and no role in a picture that said anything flattering about the sitter, so it never got commissioned. Say what you like about the animal; the account books are clear.

What that means in practice is that the cat sneaks in. You will find one in a kitchen, in the corner of a still life, on a girl's lap, under a table, watching a fish. It is almost never the reason the picture exists, and that is exactly what makes them so good: nobody was trying to impress anyone, so the animal appears the way it actually behaves.

It is worth saying that the whole cat art tradition is small. This page holds 147 pieces, against 700 for horses and 444 for dogs, so you get through it quickly. If you have looked elsewhere and found the same four images every time, that is why.

The famous ones, and where they hide

These are the pictures people know, and each one can be ordered as a hand-painted reproduction in oil.

• Bazon, The Artist's Cat by Odilon Redon. A named animal in a title is rare on this subject, and it tells you the artist knew him well.
• Cat and Bird by Paul Klee, the best known modern image of the subject and the one most people can picture without seeing it.
• Girl with a Cat by Ivan Kramskoy and Child with Cat, Julie Manet by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, two children and two very patient sitters.
• Still Life of Fish and Cat by Clara Peeters, one of the earliest and best, where the animal is the threat on the table.
• Squatting Woman Offering Milk to a Cat by Felix Vallotton, a domestic moment with nothing else going on.
• Bouquet and a Cat by Suzanne Valadon, flowers with an intruder.
• The Ray, or The Kitchen Interior by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, the great kitchen scene of its century, with an animal arching over the table.
• Wary companions by Theodore Gerard and Return from fishing by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz.
• Backyards, Greenwich Village by John French Sloan, a New York back lot with the animals that live in it.
• Woman in a Green Dress by Theo van Rysselberghe and Portrait of Catherine II, Empress of Russia by Vladimir Borovikovsky.
• Dignity and Impudence by Edwin Henry Landseer and Pomeranian Bitch and Pup by Thomas Gainsborough, two Victorian animal pictures from the same shelf.

The kitchen, the still life and the thief

If you want to know where to look for a cat in a museum, look at the food. A table piece depicts mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects that are either natural or human-made, and the moment you put a fish or a joint of meat on a table you have a story waiting to happen. Artists worked that out early.

Clara Peeters puts one next to a plate of fish. Chardin puts one over a kitchen table with a ray hanging above it. In both cases the animal is doing what everybody in the room knows it is about to do, and the picture is funnier and more alive because of it. These are the great examples of the genre, and they were never sold as cat pictures at all.

The same thing happens in genre painting. A woman offers milk. A child holds one on a lap. A fisherman comes home and something is waiting. The animal is a small engine of narrative that costs the painter almost nothing, and it is one of the oldest tricks in the trade.

Black cats, white cats and the colors of the subject

Color is a real consideration here, more than with most subjects. A black animal against a dark interior is a painting problem: you can only show the shape by the light that catches the fur, so getting a black animal right is a demonstration of technique. A white one is the opposite problem, since white has nowhere to go in the highlights.

For a room, that difference matters. A dark picture with a black animal in it reads as a shape and a pair of eyes, and it works in a warm-lit corner. A pale picture with a white animal is airier and takes daylight. Tabby and ginger sit between the two and are the safest choice if you cannot see the wall in your head.

It is also worth saying that a photo never quite captures this. The thumbnail on a catalog page flattens the darkest pictures more than any others, so open the image at full size before you make up your mind, and remember that the approval photo you get from the studio is a better guide than any listing image.

The artist's own cat

Some of the best pictures in this small field were made for nobody. Redon gave Bazon a name in the title. Valadon works hers into a flower piece. Vallotton shows a woman feeding one on a doorstep. These are not commissions; they are the artist looking at something in the room, which is the oldest reason anyone ever picked up a brush.

That is worth knowing when you choose. A commissioned animal picture flatters. An uncommissioned one simply observes. On this subject almost everything is the second kind, and it is why this little tradition punches above its weight and why a good example holds a wall so well. A cat lover will know the difference at once, and so will everyone else, even if they cannot say why.

Cats and the artists who liked them

It is a small world, this one, and the names repeat. Odilon Redon, Felix Vallotton, Suzanne Valadon, Theodore Gerard, Ivan Kramskoy: none of them is a household name outside the field, and all of them made better pictures of this animal than the household names did. That is not an accident. Vincent van Gogh worked on almost every subject there is and hardly ever this one. The great masters of the seventeenth century put one in a kitchen and moved on. The artists who loved the subject were mostly working at the edges of the art world, and their work took a long time to get seen.

So the popular story that art history is full of these things is not really true. What is true is that a few artists kept looking, and their work has aged very well. Now that people buy art for the pleasure of it rather than for status, these things have found their audience, and the popular modern taste for the subject is much stronger than the historical supply.

You can read the whole shift in one detail. In the eighteenth century the animal is a thief in the corner of somebody else's picture. By 1900 it has a name, a title and the artist's full attention. Nothing else about the way we live changed as much in that period, and the pictures recorded it before anybody wrote it down.

A little history is useful here, if only to show how recent the taste is. For four hundred years nobody would have said the words famous cat paintings out loud, since there was no such category. Then in the last hundred years or so the household animal became a subject people wanted on a wall, and museums went looking through their own stores for what they already had. Most of what turned up was exactly what you see here: kitchen scenes, children with pets, artists' own animals. Nothing was made for the market that now exists, and that is a good thing: it means these pictures are not sentimental. They come from a time before there was any reason to be.

What these pictures are worth looking at for

Three things, and they are not what you would expect. The first is posture. A cat is a bag of angles and a painter who gets the shoulder blades right has told you more than any amount of fur detail. Look at the spine in the Chardin and you can watch the whole animal move.

The second is company. Many of these works are really about two things in a room together, an animal and a child, an animal and a fish, an animal and a bunch of flowers. The subject of the picture is the relationship, not the creature, and once you notice it you will choose differently.

The third is light. Because these are indoor pictures, almost all of them, they were painted under a single window or a single candle, and that gives them a warmth that outdoor subjects never have. It is the reason they work in the rooms people actually live in rather than in the formal ones.

Most buyers arrive here wanting a picture of an animal they love and leave with a picture of a room they would like to be in. That is a good outcome, and it is worth knowing in advance so you do not fight it.

How each reproduction is made

One studio artist works from the museum reference in oil, building the coat the way the original was built, with the finest marks last. Nothing is printed and nothing is transferred at any stage. Seven sizes are available with an optional frame, and you approve a photo of the finished work before it ships. Free worldwide shipping and 90-day returns apply. On this subject look hard at the eyes in that photo: a cat's eye is the whole picture, and it is the first thing a weak copy loses.

Choosing one for your wall

Small is usually right. Nearly all of these began as modest things and they behave badly when blown up; the charm is in the scale and in the fact that nothing much is happening. A kitchen, a landing, a study or the wall beside a reading chair is where they belong, and almost nobody hangs one over a fireplace.

If you want two, pick one kitchen picture and one lap picture. They tell the two halves of the same story, the animal as thief and the animal as company, and the pair says more than either one alone. Order them together and the studio can keep the palettes consistent.

And if you are buying for someone who loves cats, the safest choice is a picture where the animal is looking out of the canvas rather than at something inside it. Those are the ones people talk to.

Browse related collections

The subject overlaps three larger groups in the catalog.

• Animal subjects in oil for every other creature.
• The canine group for the household rival.
• Kitchen and table pictures for the tradition these come from.
• Children on canvas for the lap pictures.
• Birds in paint for the other half of Cat and Bird.

Frequently asked questions

Why are there so few cat paintings in art history? Because the animal had no commercial or social value to the people who paid for pictures. Specialist animal painters worked for owners of horses and hunting dogs, so cats appear mostly as incidental figures in kitchens, table pieces and family scenes rather than as commissioned subjects.

Which is the best known cat picture here? Cat and Bird by Paul Klee is the one most people recognize, with Chardin's kitchen interior and Clara Peeters's fish piece the two great early examples in the catalog.

Are these prints? No. Every piece is an original in oil on canvas, made by hand by a studio artist, in seven sizes, with an optional frame and a photo of the finished work for your approval before it ships.

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