Elizabeth Harvey-Lee

Though traditionally the cat has been held to be the 'familiar' of witches, it might equally be so described in relation to artists, Erasmus Darwin wrote "To respect the cat is the beginning of the aesthetic sense", while Desmond Morris observed "Artists like cats; soldiers like dogs" and in the opinion of Leonardo da Vinci, "The smallest feline is a masterpiece." The American 'Pop' artist, Robert Indiana noted "After all, a cat and art are only two letters removed." One feels that when artists include a cat in their compositions, or make the cat their subject, that the cat portrayed is a part of their household.

It is strange that P. G. Hamerton, an enthusiast for etching and the graphic arts, and a contemporary of Mallet, should have opined "It is odd, notwithstanding the extreme beauty of cats, their elegance of motion, the variety and intensity of their colour, they should be so little painted by considerable artists." In terms ofprintmaking this claim does not stand up; some of the greatest printmakers have included a cat in their prints, Durer, Barocci, Bellange, Callot, Rembrandt, Hollar, Goya, Manet &c. However the instance of cat prints does increase sharply from the end of the 19th century, after Hamerton had written.

Cats appear in prints before the end of the fifteenth century, very shortly after the invention of the earliest intaglio technique of engraving. Their presence, particularly in Northern Europe where they appear first, is however generally symbolic. Perhaps the earliest example of an engraved cat is in Israhel van Meckenem's engraving ,'The Visit to the Spinner', c.1495-1503, which includes a cat resting on the floor in an interior with a woman sitting spinning accompanied by a man seated holding his sword by the hilt point down on the floor between his feet. From a series formerly considered as straight-forward scenes of daily life but now interpreted as expressions of different sorts of love, this image represents an illicit love. The cat was traditionally a medieval symbol of lust while prostitutes were nicknamed 'cats', brothels 'cathouses'; the presence of the cat points to the reason for the man's visit to the woman spinning.

In the 16th and 17th centuries a cat is often included in prints of general scenes ofwomen spinning without any overtones of illicit or 'commercial' sexual reference. Girls were taught to spin to fit them for the virtuous household duties of marriage, hence the term spinster for an as yet unmarried woman and by extension, the emblematic connotation of the spindle with female genitalia.

The visual symbolism associated with cats is complex and sometimes contradictory, reflecting various aspects of their innate characteristics and not just feline sexual proclivities, Their greed for food and lack of guilt at stealing it saw them included in kitchen scenes. Brueghel's Rich Kitchen, engraved by Pieter van de Heyden for the publisher Jerome Cock in 1563 has a cat, while the Poor Kitchen is without. Their nocturnal habits suggested night and darkness and by association evil, the Devil and witchcraft but equally sleep. Despite this bad 'press' and often being only grudgingly valued as pest controllers, the quiet, self-contained, contemplative, companionable nature of the cat also occasionally attracted the old master printmaker's attention. A cat reposing or curled up asleep emanates security and the comfort of home and hearth and invites being drawn. The Italian School seem most open to this aspect of the cat's nature. A delightful little etching by Giulio Campagnola, c,1515, shows a fat baby seated on a step whispering into the ear of one of a group of three fat cats sitting on a ledge. Eneo Vico's engraving of the Academy of Baccio Balldinelli, c.1552, has a cat at the feet of the apprentices who sit drawing in front of the fire, Federico Barocci ( see illustration left) included a sleeping cat curled up on a chair in the corner of his Annunciation, etched c.1585. When Goltzius engraved his series of The Life of the Virgin, 1593, his 'Master Pieces' in imitation of six great masters, he included a less innocent cat on a window sill springing up to catch a bird between its front paws in The Holy Family engraved in imitation of Baroccio. Several other prints of the holy family include an incidental cat. Jacques Bellange shows a cat beside the cradle in his Virgin and Child with a Cradle, c.1600-1610, Rembrandt' friend Ferdinand Bol, c.1645 and Rembrandt himself, in 1654, both etched the holy family in interiors with an attendant cat. The cat is nowhere mentioned in the Bible, but from the 16th century is portrayed in biblical subjects particularly those given a contemporary interior setting.

In the mid-17th century appeared two prints which are exceptions to the general old master sidelining of cats. Wenceslaus Hollar and Cornelis Visscher each portrayed a cat as the specific subject of a print (see items 6 & 9) , though even here Hollar's cat is surrounded by the inscription "It's a good cat that doesn't steal tidbits" and the setting and mouse in the Visscher engraving suggest the possibility of an ulterior 'hidden' meaning.

Emblem books had been popular since the later 16th century, with their moralising images which had several layers ofmeaning. Cats (in an age before neutering) featured in these illustrations usually as the subjects of amorous aphorisms. Cats also appeared in printed illustrations to popular collections of satirical fables, Reynard the Fox, the Fables of La Fontaine and their prototype, Aesop's Fables, Pictorially cats lend themselves well to anthropomorphism and were also treated in this manner in independent prints ( items 14, 22, 29) ,

The illustrations ( items 10,11) to Count Buffon's "Natural History", in the later 18th century, the first encyclopaedia of the animal world, anticipated a new interest in cats as print subjects in their own right, a move from the cat as symbol to the cat as model. Gottfried Mind in the early 19th century was the first artist to dedicate himself to the cat as a theme and in admiration of his skill and observation, capturing cats in action, at play, fighting, as well as at rest, his contemporaries gave him the sobriquet 'Raphael of the Cats'. Though not himself a printmaker, publishers commissioned engravers to etch his drawings and watercolours ( items 17-20) .

Queen Victoria helped to make cats fashionable pets. She kept Persians. Pasteur's publication in 1865 on the transmission of diseases and the benefits of hygiene further contributed to the cat's elevation from the kitchen to the drawing room; feline cleanliness and fastidiousness being their passport. The growing popularity of cats in middle class homes led to a demand for decorative pictures and prints of cats ( items 23-26) .

Artistically the cat came into its own in fin de siecle France and throughout Europe in the early decades of the 20th century. In France, writers such as Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Loti and Champfleury had expressed their affection for the cat; Manet and Steinlen gave visual expression through lithographs and etchings to a similar affection. Henry Detouche gave summation to this celebration in a colour aquatint entitled "A la Gloire du Chat" ('To the glory of the Cat') , which features a woman holding a black cat, surrounded by twenty studies of different cats. In the 20th century, noted British artists as varied as John Nash, Gill, Detmold, Stanley Anderson, Duncan Grant and Robert Colquhoun and on the Continent, Bonnard, Picasso and Otto Dix have essayed the cat as a subject. The Austrian artist Pluckebaum and the Japanese resident in Paris, Foujita, have turned to it repeatedly. A host of minor artists have produced interesting, amusing and idiosyncratic images.

While contemporary fashions in dress and hairstyles date the appearance of people portrayed in paintings and prints, cats, like all animals, are without such associations and except in the case of a newly introduced breed, have not changed in appearance or habits over the centuries. In early prints they excite a shock of recognition in their apparent modernity, This feline timelessness was captured on a grave inscription from Thebes, "The beautiful cat endures and endures". Just as Shakespeare exhorts in his sonnets that they "give life" to the one addressed, so a select number of cats through the last five hundred years have been immortalised in prints.

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