Top 10 Cats Pictured In Famous Art
Barbershop with Monkeys and Cats, Abraham Teniers
Barber Shop with Monkeys and Cats, Abraham Teniers (1629-70)
This is possibly the cat painting that can best be equated to the enduringly famous Dogs Playing Poker. However, the anthropomorphization in Abraham Teniers’ work predates its canine companion by nearly 400 years, and the surreal nature of its subject matter is quite captivating. Teniers was part of a Flemish artist family who specialized in genre paintings of villages, inns and, as logical follows, monkey scenes. The monkeys stay in this painting, but the cats are undeniably the stars, getting coiffed and ready for the weekend, served by their attentive monkey servants. There is curiously a cat in a sling to the right and a Puss in Boots-type at the door. It is a scene rich in action and the bizarre.
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By Day She Made Herself Into A Cat, Arthur Rackham
By Day She Made Herself Into A Cat, Arthur Rackham (1920)
Arthur Rackham was one of the great book illustrators of the early 20th century. This painting took inspiration from a Brothers Grimm fairytale, in which the eponymous ‘she’ is a shape-shifting witch who turns virgins into birds and cages them. There is a malevolence in the cat’s expression and posture, which very much demonstrates why the cat is the witch’s animal of choice, and it is no real leap here to see that the cat is the animal form of a dastardly witch. With his work on other tales such as Hansel and Gretel and The Wind in the Willows, Rackham proved that he was quite adept at portraying states of mind through animals. Meow.
Cat Devouring A Bird, Pablo Picasso
Cat Devouring A Bird, Pablo Picasso (1939)
Cats and Cubism, it turns out, result in something that is altogether quite unsettling. While many cats in art are very much presented as either docile house cats, sitting patiently — or sullenly — on laps, or possibly in slightly odd scenarios, Picasso’s Cat Devouring A Bird portrays a cat in its natural way of being — as a hunter, devouring its most famous foe. This comes two years after Guernica and shows his continued interest in violence and chaos. There is no evidence of whether this was Picasso’s cat. It is mostly seen as an allegory of the Spanish Civil War, with the anger in the cat’s face being almost human-like. It takes a great master to make a picture that captures the essence of a cat’s nature while saying something wider about humankind.
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Le Chat Noir, Théophile Steinlen
Le Chat Noir, Théophile Steinlen (1896)
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, advertising became increasingly sophisticated and, as has been attested by the popularity of coffee table books and shows such as Mad Men, has become a legitimate art form in and of itself. This poster by the Art Nouveau painter and printmaker Théophile Steinlen is both one of the most famous cat pictures and advertisements from history. He was commissioned to do the poster by befriending the artistic crowd at Le Chat Noir, a popular bohemian entertainment establishment that is widely thought to be the first modern cabaret club. While the club is long gone, the poster remains a mainstay on many a wall, and le chat being a perfect representation of much of 19th-century Paris.
Child With Cat, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Child With Cat, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1880-81)
Sometimes the simple joy displayed in a painting is what makes it stand the test of time. Renoir created a number of paintings with cats as a subject matter, but this particularly stands out among his works as it was a magnificent example of the research that went into his art, with the maestro making at least four preparatory drawings for the painting and taking a number of different sittings and positions to form the final composition. Also known as Julie Manet, the subject of the painting is of Édouard Manet‘s niece, with her parents being close friends of Renoir. It depicts the simple pleasures and comforts of youth exemplified by feline folly.
The Cook and the Cat, Théodule-Augustin Ribot
The Cook and the Cat, Théodule-Augustin Ribot (1860s)
There is something very natural about a fish and a cat. That the fish is a cook’s fish means that the cat in this painting has a much easier job than his brothers in the wild, but there is still a playfulness in this painting, as the cat paws the object of its desire. The cook looks oblivious to the feline thief, as he attends to the rest of his meal, although he could be purposely ignoring the fact so that his furry friend can get a treat. Ribot was a prominent Realist painter — this everyday scene was very much in his typical style, offering the viewer a peek into the kitchens of the mid-1800s.
Dali Atomicu, Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsman
Dali Atomicus, Salvador Dalí and Philippe Halsman (1948)
Some look down on photography as an art form, and considering that everyone has access to cameras, this belief does, in ways, logically make sense. Then you get someone so committed to their art that you truly appreciate the work that goes into composition. This may be quite an extreme example of this mantra, but the great Salvador Dalí was never one to do things by halves. In partnership with the portrait photographer Philippe Halsmann, the duo made a series of surreal photographic projects, with Dali Atomicus being the most iconic due to the fact that it all had to be composed in situ and without modern assistance, such as Photoshop. It took 28 attempts to get the final photo, which is 28 times that the cats had to be catapulted through the air — the price you have to pay for great art.
Mr and Mrs Smith and Percy, David Hockney
Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, David Hockney (1970-71)
One of David Hockney‘s most impressive and renowned pictures is a portrait of his friends, the fashion designer Ossie Clark and the textile designer Celia Birtwell — and their cat Percy. Hockney created the portrait shortly after the couple’s wedding. It is rife with symbolism, and Percy is an important part of this. As he looks aloofly out of the window, more than just representing cat-hood, it alludes to infidelity, envy, and Clark’s bisexual affairs which plagued the marriage and eventually led to its demise in 1974. Hockney commented that the aim of the painting was to “achieve […] the presence of two people in this room [with the main aim being] to paint the relationship of these people.” Sometimes all you need is to add a cat to speak volumes on relationships.
Rays Laugh, Richard Billingham
Ray’s A Laugh, Richard Billingham (2000)
British photographer and artist Richard Billingham is best known for his photobook Ray’s A Laugh, a poignant and insightful documentation of the life of his mother and alcoholic father. The photo series is harrowingly honest, documenting much of his father’s alcohol-fueled activities and the effect that this has on those close to him. There are many heartbreaking and intimate moments, but one of the standouts — and arguably, whether sadly or not, most resonant with the millennial generation — is a well-timed picture of a cat mid-air while being thrown. It is a meme-worthy photograph that still has the color and tenderness of the rest of the series.
Temptation of St Anthony Right Panel, Hieronymous Bosch
Triptych of the Temptation of St Anthony, Hieronymous Bosch
Triptych of the Temptation of St Anthony, Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1501)
This list shall end with one of the most harrowing pieces of art — cat or no — to ever have been created. Bosch is far from being the only person to take the story of the temptation of St Anthony as the subject of a visual art piece, but this is certainly among the most well-known interpretations of it. The triptych tells the story of the mental and spiritual torments experienced by St Anthony, and as was Bosch’s signature, it contains a variety of fantastical, mythical and disturbing imagery. On the right panel, in the wilderness, you will see a cat hissing at a woman who is trying to tempt hermit Anthony with her naked body. The fish is a symbol of Christianity, but cats — particularly this one, with its horn-like ears — were often emblems of the demonic.
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‘When is it too early to teach your kids about genocide?’ Inside the Imperial War Museum’s harrowing new galleries
From the Somme to Afghanistan and Iraq, 500 works capture a century of warfare at the museum’s new Blavatnik art, film and photography galleries. You could spend days in its screening rooms alone, says our writer
Mon 6 Nov 2023 13.35 CET Last modified on Mon 6 Nov 2023 13.36 CET
D uring the first world war, 124,702 British soldiers were victims of gas attacks. They suffered blisters, burns or temporary blindness and 2,308 of them died. In July 1918, the Ministry of Information sent American society portraitist John Singer Sargent to the front. There he witnessed the aftermath of mustard gas attacks and was inspired to make a six-metre wide tableau called Gassed depicting a procession of wounded men stumbling, blindfolded, towards a dressing station, while in the foreground more men lie dead and dying, their bodies entangled.
Recently cleaned to reveal a rosy evening light (and even Tommies playing an incongruous football match in the painting’s background), Gassed is the centrepiece of the Imperial War Museum’s new Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries in London. This permanent exhibition features about 500 works tracing the history of war art from July 1916 when Muirhead Bone became the first official artist making etchings in the Somme’s killing fields, to the 21st century and works such as Paul Seawright’s 2002 photograph Mounds, which unwittingly echoes Bone’s work by depicting an Afghan landscape bombed senseless, unpeopled and riddled with mines.
Many of the most piercing images don’t depict battlefields. David Cotterell’s 2009 Gateway II shows casualties being operated on aboard a plane as they make their journey from Camp Bastion in Afghanistan to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. The photographs show, as Cotterell put it, that “for all of the talk of technology and diplomacy and of things advancing, we’re still essentially putting young people in front of sharp objects and trying to train them to hurt each other to solve problems”.
Other photographs here depict ordinary terraced streets in Northern Ireland, devoid of people yet surreally scarred with watch towers and other British Army fortifications. Most likely these buildings went scarcely regarded by the locals every day during the Troubles. Military occupation, Jonathan Olley’s images tell us, has obscenely become the new normal.
You could and probably should spend days here in the galleries’ two screening rooms. There is feature-length footage of the battle of Arras, footage from D-Day beaches, even a second world war information film about how to make a compost heap. It’s striking that newsreels of corpses unearthed at Belsen concentration camp are hidden behind a little wall so parents can decide whether their children should be exposed to their horror. When, I wonder, is too early to teach kids about genocide? And is art made at or inspired by the Holocaust – Doris Zinkeisen’s 1945 painting of naked corpses at Belsen, or Edith Birkin’s disturbingly colourful 1990 painting Roll Call: Belsen – any less likely to give children nightmares? I don’t pretend to know the answers.
There is nothing, at least not yet, from the 2023 killing grounds of Israeli kibbutzim or the current hellscape of Gaza. There is, though, a 17-minute film by British-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi called Electrical Gaza that depicts the city in all its unexpected poetry and expected squalor during a pause in 2014 before Israeli soldiers moved in. Nashashibi’s film might well soon serve as aide-memoire to the city.
When Virginia Woolf saw Gassed at the Royal Academy in 1919, she ran away. Art does that to art lovers, used as we are to having our eyes delighted. “One fled downstairs, out of doors, round the motor cars, beneath the disdain of the horse and its rider, and so out into the comparative sobriety of Piccadilly,” she wrote in her essay The Fleeting Portrait. In part, this was because of the shock of the subject matter: “Gassed at last pricked some nerve of protest, or perhaps of humanity.”
But Woolf also distrusted the picture because of a particular detail. One of the blinded men is raising his leg to the level of his elbow in order to mount an imagined step an inch or two above the ground. “This little piece of over emphasis of the surgeon’s knife which is said to hurt more than the whole operation,” she wrote. Woolf’s suggestion – that Sargent had confected this purportedly telling detail – goes to the heart of a theme explored repeatedly in these galleries, namely how artists distort reality in order to capture the truth of what they have seen. One of the first exhibits is by Frank Hurley, the official photographer of the Australian Imperial Force. He lugged heavy equipment to and from the front, struggling to keep his plates dry and light-tight. Eighty years before Photoshop and digital photography, and long before our era of fake news, Instagram filters, and retouching apps, Hurley made composite images from different negatives the better “to illustrate to the public the things our fellows do and how war is”.
Truth, we’re told, is the first casualty of war. Peter Jackson effectively suggests it can be brought back to life in unprecedented colour
He could not do otherwise: “To include the event on a single negative, I have tried and tried, but the results are hopeless,” he said. In his photograph, The Morning After the First Battle of Passchendaele, Hurley shows Australian wounded outside a blockhouse, but the sunbeams bursting through clouds he added from another photograph. It’s as if Hurley was trying not just to manufacture a more poignant truth than reality allows, but to make beauty out of mud and misery.
Nearby a screen is showing They Shall Not Grow Old, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson’s 2018 film in which he colourised 100-year-old black-and-white war footage using Photoshop and other software. “They experienced the war in full living colour,” said Jackson, “so why shouldn’t we now, with the technology we have, turn it from a black-and-white war back into a colour war again?”
Truth, we’re always told, is the first casualty of war; Jackson effectively suggests it can be brought back to life in unprecedented colour. But is the truth something that can be manufactured? Is the heightened realism of Jackson’s colourised film as unreliable as Stalin’s airbrushed photographs or cropped press snaps that censor off-message details exhibited elsewhere in these galleries?
Ironically, the dubious detail that so troubled Virginia Woolf in Sargent’s painting was based on fact. A field ambulance driver wrote to the Athenaeum, which had published Woolf’s essay: “I saw Mr Sargent collecting his details. I have seen the picture in question, also, and it is the man at the end of the file that Mr Sargent has portrayed in this action. It is ‘over-emphasis’, but on the part of the man – not that of the artist … it is a depiction of the truth.”
Of course, war art often isn’t displayed as the artist would like. In another room there is a mysterious large oak cabinet. Amid all the other clamorous depictions of war, this freestanding furniture seems incomprehensible. What does it mean? Fast-forward to 2003 when Turner Prize-winning Steve McQueen spent a week as official Ministry of Defence artist in Basra. It was there that he conceived Queen and Country which he imagined could have become the most disseminated, certainly the most licked, piece of war art ever. His idea was simple: commemorate each of the 179 British Forces personnel killed in the Iraq conflict with their own postage stamp, juxtaposing an image of the dead soldier chosen by their family, with the silhouetted head of the Queen.
But it never happened. Instead, the stamps are housed in sheets in drawers in this cabinet. Art has been filed away for the foreseeable. “I can’t think why the project would be controversial,” McQueen has said. “We sent people to war and they died in that war. I’m just visualising their memory. I can’t see any reason not to, unless you’re ashamed of them.” Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the dead with the Queen’s head that made some queasy. Perhaps the commercial brand of the privatised Royal Mail risked being tarnished by association with martial sacrifice. Safer to monetise collectible postage stamps for Paddington and Harry Potter fans. But still … how could we be ashamed of these soldiers, even those of us who thought invading Afghanistan and Iraq was Tony Blair’s folly?
Blair’s folly, incidentally, is captured elsewhere. Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps’s 2007 photomontage shows Blair holding his phone for a selfie against a background of burning oilfields. It’s Frank Hurley for our times – a composite image designed to capture what the artist takes to be a deeper truth.In 2023, as war marches on unstoppably from one folly to another, the space offered to us by the Imperial War Museum to pause and reflect seems not just topical but essential.
The Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries open at Imperial War Museum, London, on 10 November
