Cats in art: the artists and artworks behind a royal cat portrait

Cats have been made into art for thousands of years, and each age made them for its own reasons. Egyptians cast bronze cats for a goddess. Medieval monks described cats in books about animals and drew them chasing mice in the margins of prayer books. Japanese printmakers dressed cats as actors, and painters in Paris drew their own cats at home. This guide follows that long history in order, explains what a cat in an old artwork can mean, and shows how the same ideas help you choose a royal portrait of your own cat. Each of the ten pages linked below goes deeper into one artist or tradition, using the records of the museums and libraries that hold the works. Ten individual paintings, from Leonardo to Manet's Olympia, are picked out with the museum that holds each one in our article on famous paintings of cats; this hub covers the artists and traditions behind them.

Why cats in art matter for a portrait of your cat

A royal portrait of a cat joins a long line of pictures in which a person decided a cat was worth recording. Some of those pictures show one real animal with its own coat and its own name. Others use a cat to say something about a god, a household or a human feeling. Knowing the difference helps you decide what you want a portrait of your cat to say.

It also helps with practical choices. Old artists had to decide how to pose a cat, where to put it against a background, and how to show its fur. Henriette Ronner-Knip, for example, posed her cats in a glass cage with cushions to hold them still, according to the Rijksmuseum. A modern portrait starts from a photo and raises the same questions: which pose, which colours and which setting suit this cat.

Cats in art through history

Ancient Egypt: cats for a goddess

The oldest cat artworks in this guide come from Egypt. From October 2017 to January 2018 the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art showed Divine Felines, 80 objects from the Middle Kingdom (2008 to 1630 BC) to the Byzantine period. The museum listed statues, coffins, amulets, textiles and a mummified cat among them. It explained that Egyptians kept cats to keep away mice and snakes, and that cats also came to stand for powerful kings and gods.

Harvard Art Museums calls the seated cat the most popular animal made in bronze during the first millennium BC. Its own bronze cat was cast by the lost-wax method, in which a wax model is covered in clay and the wax is melted out and replaced with metal. Many of these objects had a religious job. The Art Institute of Chicago says wooden cat coffins held mummified cats and were given in temples, and that the cat shape suggests they were presented to the goddess Bastet. Egyptian artists also drew cats for fun. The Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels holds a limestone flake from the New Kingdom, 1550 to 1069 BC, on which a cat serves a lady mouse. Our page on Egyptian cat art covers the bronzes, amulets, coffins and these joke drawings.

Medieval manuscripts: cats and mice

In the Middle Ages cats appear in handwritten books. The University of Aberdeen describes a bestiary as a collection of short descriptions of animals, real and imaginary, each with a moral lesson. Its own Aberdeen Bestiary, from the 12th century, calls the cat musio because it is the enemy of mice. Cats also appear in the margins of prayer books. A book of hours made in England around 1300, now at the Walters Art Museum, shows Tibert the Cat carrying the front of the bier, the frame that holds a coffin, at the funeral of Renard the Fox. Both are characters from animal stories. Real cats left marks too. The British Library shows a 12th-century copy of the letters of Pope Gregory the Great with four muddy paw prints on one page. Our page on cats in medieval manuscripts looks at bestiaries, margins and the cats that walked on the books.

Europe before 1800: the cat as a sign

The National Gallery in London says cats were kept to control mice and rats and often appear in paintings, but that before the 18th century European artists rarely painted them as lap pets. In many older paintings the cat stands for an idea. The same gallery calls the cat licking an oyster shell in Jan Steen's painting of a man offering an oyster to a woman "a traditional symbol of lust". Our page on cat symbolism in art compares those meanings across China, Korea, Japan and the Netherlands. The cats that Renaissance painters placed beside saints and at the Last Supper are covered in cats in Renaissance paintings.

Japan in the 1800s: Kuniyoshi and the woodblock print

Japanese printmakers made cats into popular characters. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art says Utagawa Kuniyoshi was fond of cats, and that they often appear in his prints, sometimes dressed as courtesans or actors. The Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo says he concentrated on these pictures of cats acting like people in 1841 and 1842. In 1841 he made a round fan picture that showed cats with the faces of kabuki actors. When it became popular, a kabuki play used these fan pictures. Our page on Japanese cat prints covers Kuniyoshi's series and the other printmakers who drew cats.

Paris in the 1800s: Manet, Champfleury and Steinlen

In 1869 the French writer Champfleury published a book about cats, Les Chats. The British Library says it was advertised with a poster using a lithograph by Édouard Manet of two cats on a rooftop, The Cats' Rendezvous, which the Art Institute of Chicago dates to 1868. In the 1885 English translation, Champfleury wrote that "Next to the Egyptians the Japanese are, par excellence, painters of the cat." Manet also painted his own cat. The National Gallery in London says his Woman with a Cat shows his wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, with their cat Zizi asleep on her lap. Our page on Manet's cats follows his cat prints and drawings beyond Olympia.

The journal Le Chat Noir, "The Black Cat", was founded in 1882 to promote a cabaret of the same name in Montmartre, according to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The library says Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen was one of the first artists to draw wordless picture stories for it, and one of the most prolific. Many of his stories star cats. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, holds his book of them, Des chats: images sans paroles, which it dates to 1898 with a question mark. Our page on Steinlen's cats covers the journal, the book and his house full of cats.

The painters who made cats their subject

Two artists of the later 1800s built their careers on cats. Henriette Ronner-Knip was born in Amsterdam in 1821 and died near Brussels in 1909. The Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon, a Dutch dictionary of women's lives, says she first became known for paintings of dogs and began painting the cats that made her famous from 1870. The Rijksmuseum holds her Cat at Play, a young cat among dominoes. Our page on Henriette Ronner-Knip covers her training, her methods and her buyers.

In London, Louis Wain began drawing his cat Peter to cheer his wife, Emily, during her illness, according to The National Archives. His first cat piece for the Illustrated London News appeared in 1884. Frances Simpson's Book of the Cat, published in 1903, records that he followed Harrison Weir as president of the National Cat Club. Our page on Louis Wain follows his magazines, his annuals, his hospital years and the argument over his late patterned cats.

The 1900s: Gwen John and Foujita

Two painters of the early 1900s drew their own cats again and again. Museum Wales says the Welsh painter Gwen John got her first cat, a tortoiseshell, in Paris in 1904 and named it Edgar Quinet after the street where she lived. The cat disappeared in 1908. In 1976 the National Museum of Wales bought nearly 1,000 works from her studio, and the museum says her drawings include sketches of cats. Our page on Gwen John's cats covers these drawings and her paintings of girls holding cats.

The Japanese painter Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886 to 1968) lived and worked in Paris for many years. The Musées de Reims say he adopted his cat Mikè after it followed him home one evening near the Parc Montsouris, and that he painted himself beside it several times. The Centre Pompidou holds one of these self-portraits, painted in 1928. The Tokyo Fuji Art Museum holds a copy of A Book of Cats, published in 1930 with texts by Michael Joseph and 20 of Foujita's cat drawings. Our page on Foujita's cats covers his paintings, prints and books.

How to read a cat in an old artwork

A few ideas make most cat artworks easier to understand.

Subject or sign. Ask whether the cat is the subject or a sign. Ronner-Knip and Wain made cats the whole subject. In a Dutch genre painting, a painting of everyday life, the cat may stand for a human feeling.

The same cat, different meanings. The meaning depends on where the work was made. The Cleveland Museum of Art says the Chinese words for cat and butterfly sound like mao die, a word for a person in their eighties. Its painting Cat and Butterfly by Min Zhen therefore wishes a friend a long life. In Japan, the SFO Museum says a beckoning cat figure with its left paw raised brings luck to a business, and with its right paw raised brings good fortune to the home.

Painting or print. Many famous cat pictures are prints, made in many copies. Kuniyoshi's cats are woodblock prints, cut into wood and printed in colour. Manet's Cats' Rendezvous is a lithograph, a print made from a drawing on stone.

The real cat behind the picture. Several artists drew their own cats: Manet's Zizi, Gwen John's Edgar Quinet, Foujita's Mikè and Louis Wain's Peter. Those works are the closest the past comes to a modern pet portrait.

Common mistakes when looking at cats in art

Reading every cat as a symbol. The National Gallery says cats were kept to control vermin and often appear in paintings. Some painted cats are there because a household had a cat.

Taking an Egyptian bronze cat for a pet portrait. Many of these bronzes and coffins were religious gifts. The Art Institute of Chicago says cat coffins held mummified cats given in temples, most likely to Bastet. The lives of real Egyptian cats are a separate subject, covered in cats in ancient Egypt.

Treating a story as a fact. Some famous details about cat artists are told as stories and cannot be checked. Where a museum reports a rumour, the pages in this guide say so.

Reading Louis Wain's patterned cats as a record of illness. In 1939 the psychiatrist Walter Maclay arranged eight of Wain's patterned cats in an order meant to show mental decline. The Wellcome Collection says there was no evidence for that order.

Cat artists and traditions compared

Ten famous single works with cats, from Leonardo to Gwen John, are listed with their museums in famous paintings of cats. Cats at the royal courts of Japan, Korea and Siam, as animals in real palaces, are covered in royal cats of Asia. For the same history told through dogs, see dogs in art.

Coat colour: what old artists had to solve

A painter of cats has to show fur against a background. A black cat against a dark wall is hard to see, and so is a white cat on a pale cushion. The Rijksmuseum's watercolour The Musicians by Ronner-Knip shows a mother cat and her kittens in a domestic interior.

The coat colour preview further down this page helps with the same problem for your own cat. You choose a photo, and the tool reads it in your browser, so the photo never leaves your device. It finds the main colours in the middle 60 percent of the photo and lists each colour with its share. It then shows the main colour against four backdrops, near black, deep red, forest green and royal blue, with a contrast ratio for each. The ratio uses the formula in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the W3C, where contrast runs from 1:1 to 21:1. A higher number means the coat stands out more from that backdrop.

From cat art to a royal portrait of your cat

The artists in this guide show a cat in three main ways: as a symbol, as a character in a story, or as one real animal with its own face. A royal portrait belongs to the third kind. It puts your cat at the centre and dresses it as a ruler.

Purrealism offers 15 royal portrait styles. Nine come from Indian courts: Indian Royalty, Maharaja, Maharani, Patiala Royalty, Chola Warrior, Mysore Royal, Mughal Emperor, Rajput Warrior and Maratha King. Six come from European history: Renaissance Royal, Victorian Noble, Military General, Medieval Knight, Baroque Aristocrat and Regency Era. The cover of this page shows a white and ginger cat as a Maharani in a green and gold gown, and the gallery shows it with other finished portraits. The guide on how to choose a royal portrait style compares the styles.

When you are ready, the portrait studio takes one clear photo of your cat, up to 5 MB. You can choose a digital download, or an art print in 8 × 10, 12 × 16, 18 × 24 or 24 × 36 inches on matte or glossy paper. Run the photo through the coat colour preview first if you want to see which backdrop colour gives your cat's coat the most contrast.