These days you cannot venture online without being besieged by cats. Instagram is full of them — ancient, modern, cute and cuddly or posing as the dark lord of the cativerse. On YouTube cats can even speak, holding forth about their years of hideous addiction to catnip or else bitching about the dachshund that has moved in next door. Look for a birthday card and you’ll be hard-pushed to find one that doesn’t feature a cat in a tuxedo or lounging by the pool in sunglasses.
All this is a startling modern phenomenon. For centuries you rarely came across a domestic cat taking centre stage in western art and culture. Indeed, they were virtually invisible. Pride of place went to martial horses and noble dogs — creatures that could be relied on to garnish the workings of patriarchal power. Paintings by Stubbs and Landseer commemorate men of property and station buttressed by their hunters, beagles, racehorses and faithful hounds. No wonder that when Napoleon wanted to show himself in his pomp, as the conqueror of all Europe, he chose to be painted on his rearing Arabian steed rather than cuddling one of Josephine’s many cats. (The general was in fact feline-phobic and would rush out of the room if one should saunter in.)
Consequently, for centuries cats were shuffled to the edges of the frame as useful space-fillers or made to bear symbolic weight as signifiers of malice, petty crime and general moral dereliction. If cats cropped up at all in the visual worlds of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, they were disrupting domestic harmony by stealing food from a serenely set table or winding around the ankles of some biblical Jezebel. Yet, slowly at first and then in a steady stream, the cat began to take up a central position in art, in the process bringing new ways of seeing and making the world. The animal’s sculptural form, endlessly varied coloration and ability to stretch and scrunch like a shapeshifter caught the imagination and challenged the practice of the world’s greatest painters. Whenever art took a leap forward or swerved towards something new and unexpected, you could bet that there was a cat in there somewhere. Here is how they evolved.
1. Thirteenth-century religious manuscript
The best place to find cats in the Middle Ages is in religious manuscripts. The monks who made these sacred texts kept cats not so much as silent companions but as pest controllers, to protect the precious parchment pages from the nibbles of hungry mice. It is not unusual to find feline paw prints still visible in the margins — the result of the feline security guard walking over the paint before it was dry.
In the Bodleian’s image from a 13th-century bestiary, the cat is doing its proper job of keeping the domestic space free from rodents — in this case a large black rat. The fact that the cat does not have anything we would regard as a feline form should not come as a surprise. Until the late Victorian period, when domestic cats started to be selectively bred by enthusiasts to produce the looks that we are familiar with today, the average moggie resembled nothing so much as a pointy-faced weasel with the tail of a rat. As for the nightmarish chicken legs on show in this image, we should probably put that down to artistic licence — or limitation.
Advertisement
2. Madonna with Cat by Leonardo da Vinci, c 1480
Leonardo may have declared that “the smallest feline is a masterpiece” but, while he drew many cats, none features in his final paintings. A clue to their glaring absence comes in this preparatory study for Madonna with Cat. The artist always used human sitters for his Holy Family — real mothers with real children and, in this case, a real cat. But it’s clear that the challenge of keeping toddler and puss still for a second is beyond even the Renaissance skill set. The child is strangling the cat in a chubby-armed effort to stop it escaping, while the cat looks as if it is about to scratch before stalking off in protest. Leonardo realised that while he might eventually be able to get the child to stay still, the cat would always insist on having nothing to do with such nonsense.
3. The Angora Cat by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Marguerite Gérard, c 1783
For centuries it was thought that this sumptuous picture of a rococo lady and her elegant cat was the sole work of the drawing-room darling Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Now art historians believe it was a co-production with his sister-in-law, Marguerite Gérard, with whom he shared a studio at the Louvre. Particularly striking is the way the cat does double duty as metaphor and moggie. On the one hand the exquisite angora, then a newly fashionable breed in Paris, appears to be performing in a morality play, judging by the stagey way in which it throws up its paws in excitement at seeing its reflection in the shiny globe. Omnia Vanitas. On the other, the cat may simply be expressing alarm at the way that its mistress is bearing down on it with a spiky brush, determined to get the tangles out of that silky coat. Fragonard and Gérard use the figure of the cat to produce an art that is both sumptuous and moral, elevated and intimately domestic.
4. The White Cat by Pierre Bonnard, 1894
By the middle of the 19th century the cat had become the preferred companion of intellectuals and artists, not least because its lifestyle fitted so perfectly with theirs. As crepuscular creatures cats loved nothing more than sauntering out at dusk to encounter the theatre of the city streets, just like a “flâneur” — then a new term, coined by the cat-loving poet Baudelaire.
Pierre Bonnard painted many cats, but none is quite as wonderfully strange as Le Chat Blanc (The White Cat). In this elastic pose the cat appears to have no neck, while its four paws are hovering off the ground. Is it arching its back because it wants to be stroked, or is it bristling with irritation at unwanted human contact? The tail twisted into a question mark serves to emphasise the ambiguity.
While Bonnard doesn’t give his cat strictly realistic proportions, he captures wonderfully the animal’s peculiar elasticity, the way it moves like water. Drawing on the traditions of Japanese art, with its attention to flatness and surface design, Bonnard prioritises form and style over the literal truth of the subject. Here is a painting that marks the moment when art takes a decisive turn away from the old codes of realism towards the new designs of modernism.
5. The Mountain of the Sacred Cat by Paul Klee, 1923
Advertisement
The Bauhaus artist Paul Klee raises the cat to the figure of a deity, with humans reduced to the role of worshipping servants. This was a sly nod to the popular myth that the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats. (For the record, the Egyptians venerated them, which is something different.) In this image Klee draws on the modern art movements of expressionism, cubism and surrealism to say something enduring about the way the cat manages to extract devoted attention from its humans, no matter the terms of the contract between them.
In his private life Klee was a devoted cat man who allowed his many feline companions the run of the studio. When the American art collector Edward Warburg visited Klee, he stopped a cat from walking across a still-wet watercolour, afraid that it would leave a paw print. Klee merely laughed and told Warburg to let the animal wander where it wanted. “Many years from now one of your art connoisseurs will wonder how in the world I ever got that effect.” The medieval monks would have nodded in agreement.
6. Missing poster for Docket by Tracey Emin, 2002
Tracey Emin uses her art to process, record and represent her life. The unmade bed of 1998 was a case in point: a snapshot of her life at a particularly low moment after a break-up. One relationship that never let her down was with her cat Docket, which lasted for 19 years until the animal’s death in 2020. Docket figured in many of Emin’s artworks, including bronze statues and a multimedia installation made out of tin cans — a flexibility that returns us to the Renaissance facility of Leonardo, who could conjure a cat out of nothing, even if he couldn’t get it to sit still.
When Docket went missing in 2002, Emin plastered the area near her home with “Lost Cat” notices. But just as quickly as they were put up, they were taken down by canny pedestrians anxious to own a piece of Emin’s pricey art for themselves. These bits of tattered ephemera were reportedly being traded for £500, although Emin’s gallery sniffily suggested that “Tracey does deal with memorabilia, but the posters are not works of art”.
But really, how can that be? Emin’s trademark has always been the lack of any discernible boundary between her life and her work. In which case it is hard to see how the “Lost Cat” posters do not count as part of her legitimate output. It is an essential dilemma, pressing on the difficult question of whether today’s move towards autobiographical art practice (Emin is hardly the only one) can really set arbitrary fences between what counts as a work of art and is sold accordingly. No surprise, though, that we should find a cat at the heart of this tricky matter.
Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes (4th Estate £22) is published on Apr 25. Buy from timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Discount for Times+ members
