However, feline representations abound in nineteenth-century pictorial art, including Julie Manet by Pierre Auguste Renoir, La mort du cochon [Death of the Pig] by Louis Leopold Boilly, Miss May Belfort by Toulouse-Lautrec, and L'atelier du peintre [The Artist's Studio] by Gustave Courbet.
Apart from the famous Olympia with her black cat, Edouard Manet composed a superb piece featuring a white cat and a black cat sitting on a roof in the moonlight: Chats de Champfleury [Cats of Champfleury]. Gericault painted a white cat full of goodness and melancholy.
The two kittens at the center of Gaugin's painting, entitled "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?", illustrate innocence.
Cats are also present in paintings by Maurice Denis, including Le Goûter [The Snack] (1919) and Hommage à Cézanne [Homage to Cézanne].
Some nineteenth-century, so-called "bourgeois" painters were almost entirely devoted to cats. One hundred eighty-two of these specialized painters have been recorded, including Philippe Rousseau (L'importun [The Intruder], 1850) and Louis-Eugene Lambert (Famille de chats [Family of Cats], 1887) in France and Charles Van den Eycken in Belgium.
This abundance of cats in pictorial art continued into the twentieth century with works like Le corsage a carreaux [The Checkered Blouse], Le chat blanc [The White Cat], and La petite fille au chat [Little Girl With a Cat] by Pierre Bonnard. These pieces suggest new facets and unique attitudes for feline subjects.
The many cats in the world of Balthus (Mitsou, Quarante images [Forty Images], Le chat de la Mediterranee [The Cat of the Mediterranean]) contributed to the erotic atmosphere the artist cherished.
Another amazing painting is that by Douanier Rousseau, who drew a Portrait of Pierre Loti (or of Edmond Achille Frank?) and his cat, adding a more naive aspect to his work.
An ardent admirer of cats, Theophile Alexandre Steinlein (1859-1923) made portraits of thousands of cats of all breeds in all settings. He also helped decorate the "Black Cat" cabaret.
Japanese artist Foujita (1886-1968) produced many self portraits featuring a cat on his shoulder (Self Portrait, 1928, Centre Pompidou). His far eastern calligraphy is admirably well-suited to his lithographs.
Fernand Léger
This modernist painter surrounded his mistress with cats and books in La femme au chat [The Woman With a Cat] (1921).
Francis Picabia, Marc Chagall (Paris par la fenetre [Paris Through the Window]), Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso (Chat devorant un oiseau [Cat Devouring a Bird]) all painted cats.
But not until the twentieth century did cats enter the world of painting under their own name: Rapinou by Suzanne Valadon, Lulu by Vollard, Sita by Cecilia Beaux, etc.
A huge cat lover, Leonor Fini represented cats as "individuals in their own right" beautiful, magical, natural, innocent, very sensual, and rebellious in a world where the borders between animal and human were blurred. According to Fini, her attraction to these animals was not mysterious; she was simply moving "toward a perfect being, more beautiful than all others." Many of these paintings show sphinxes, women with the body of a cat.
Fini created masks, costumes, theater and dance sets (Les demoiselles de la nuit [The Young Women of the Night], a 1948 ballet by Roland Petit) inspired by her fetish animal. She spoke about her love of cats to her friend Stanislao Lepri (Coup de foudre [Love at first sight], 1972, De pere inconnu [From an Unknown Father], 1975).
Contemporary fantasy art often features black panthers or cats as symbols of femininity. Pieces include Katzen Portrait by German painter Carl Rohring (1980), in which the head of a cat is surrounded by feathers and dried flowers forming a fanciful head of hair like a woman's.
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