A cat will not hold a pose, and painters kept putting one into their pictures anyway. Some of the cats on this page were pets with names. Others sit beside children who did not live to grow up, and the families who looked at the canvas understood the warning. One turns a whole Japanese highway into a string of puns.
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How These Were Chosen
A cat makes a poor model. It sleeps, washes or wanders off, so a painter has to work from glances. What it gives back is a second center of attention, because what the cat watches, hunts or ignores tells the viewer how to read the scene.
For centuries the cat was mostly a sign. Around 1534, Lorenzo Lotto put a frightened cat between the angel Gabriel and Mary in an Annunciation. Cats had to wait until the 1800s for pictures of their own, the century of England's first cat show, held in London in 1871.
The rule here is simple. The cat has to change what the picture says, as an omen, a joke, an emblem or a companion painted for its own sake. A cat that could be painted out without changing anything stayed off the page.
12. Suzanne Valadon, Portrait of Miss Lily Walton (1922)
Raminou, a ginger tabby with a yellow bow at its neck, lies across the lap of a woman in a white blouse and a long black skirt, seated in a carved wooden armchair. The cat belonged to the painter, Suzanne Valadon. The woman is Lily Walton, the English housekeeper Valadon hired in the 1920s, once her own paintings had started to sell. Valadon painted the two of them in 1922.
A housekeeper was a sign of how far Valadon had come, because for years she had been the one sitting still. Born Marie-Clémentine Valadon in 1865 in Bessines-sur-Gartempe, a village in central France, she posed as a teenager in Paris for Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, a painter of large murals for public buildings, and later for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Her way to the other side of the easel came through Edgar Degas, who took her drawings seriously. He bought them and taught her etching on his own press, the start of her path from model to painter. By about 1917 she had her own studio on rue Cortot, in Montmartre, and Raminou was already one of her subjects.
Five years later, in this portrait, she gives the cat and the housekeeper the same colors. Raminou's red coat repeats Lily Walton's hair, and both are ringed with the thick dark outline found all through Valadon's painting. One of the sitter's hands rests on the cat's back.
To me, the real sitter is Raminou. Lily Walton looks off past the painter, and only the cat meets our eyes.
At a Glance
Artist: Suzanne Valadon (French, 1865 to 1938)
Painted: 1922
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 100 × 81 cm (39 × 32 in)
Where to see it: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Limoges (on deposit from the Centre Pompidou, Paris)
11. Ammi Phillips, Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog (about 1830 to 1835)
A white cat is pressed against the red dress of a little girl who sits facing out of the picture, while a brown and white dog lies under the bench at the lower left. Ammi Phillips painted her in the 1830s in Dutchess County, New York, in the Hudson Valley north of New York City. Her name has not survived, and in one detail she stands apart from three other children Phillips painted in red at the same time.