Gwen John's cats: Edgar Quinet, the cat drawings and the girls holding cats

Gwen John (1876 to 1939) was a Welsh painter who spent most of her working life in and near Paris, and who kept cats from her first year in Paris, 1904, onward. This page covers her first cat, Edgar Quinet, and what museum records and her own words say about it; the small cat studies in the Gwen John studio collection at Amgueddfa Cymru, Museum Wales; the cat drawings at Tate; her paintings of girls and young women holding cats; and the 2026 exhibition, which included paintings of her cats. It draws on Museum Wales, Tate and other museums, and on a history sheet published by the town of Meudon. For the wider story of cats in art, start with the cats in art guide.

From Wales to Paris

Museum Wales says John was born in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, in 1876. She attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1895 to 1898, one of the first generation of women to receive a formal art education. The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington says she left for Paris in 1898 to study at the new art school of the painter James McNeill Whistler.

In 1903 she set off on a walking tour through France with her friend Dorelia McNeill. By the beginning of 1904, according to Museum Wales, she had settled in Paris.

That same year she began to model for the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The National Museum of Women in the Arts says she was his model and lover from 1904 until his death in 1917. The Musée Rodin in Paris says Rodin borrowed her features for the muse in his monument to Whistler, a memorial ordered from him in 1905 and never finished. The town of Meudon says the Musée Rodin keeps close to 1,000 letters she wrote to him.

Edgar Quinet, the first cat

John's first cat arrived in the same year, 1904. Museum Wales explains it in its record of a sheet of Cat studies (NMW A 5451): "Gwen John acquired her first cat in 1904. It was a tortoiseshell cat that she named Edgar Quinet after the street in which she was living." Pallant House Gallery adds that the cat was female, in spite of the man's name.

What John wrote about the cat

The same Museum Wales record quotes John's own words about one of her cats: "she is very important, perhaps the most important thing but that ought not to be, n'est pas?" The last words are her French for "isn't it?" She admits that the cat matters more to her than she thinks it should.

The loss in 1908

Edgar Quinet disappeared in 1908. Museum Wales says John "was devastated and even wrote a poem about her loss". Pallant House Gallery also records the poem. A 2004 article in Tate Etc., the magazine published by Tate, adds a detail: when the cat vanished, John spent days camping out in the woods in the hope of finding it. The same article says she never killed the insects she found in her house, and carried them out to the street in a box instead.

Pallant House Gallery says John had many cats over her life.

The cat drawings at Museum Wales

In 1976, a hundred years after John's birth, the National Museum of Wales bought nearly 1,000 works from her nephew, Edwin John. The museum's blog explains that a studio collection is everything left in an artist's studio at their death. John died suddenly in September 1939. Edwin brought what he could to Britain as the Second World War began, and returned after the war for the rest.

The museum says the collection has over 900 drawings, six oil paintings and several sketchbooks. Among the landscapes, street views and flowers are "sketches of cats and horses". The museum adds that John often worked in series, drawing the same subject again and again, sometimes almost the same each time and sometimes in new colours. Before this purchase, the museum owned only three drawings and four oil paintings by her. It now holds the largest public collection of her work anywhere.

The cat sheets are small: seven of the eight in the table below are between 15.6 and 16.9 cm tall. The records describe pencil drawings with watercolour or a wash, a thin layer of watered paint. Museum Wales says she "frequently captured her adored cats in spontaneous drawings", meaning quick sketches.

All of these came to the museum in the 1976 purchase. The online records give no year for them. When we checked the records in September 2026, Seated tortoiseshell cat, Cat washing itself, two of the Cat studies sheets and Girl with a cat were marked "Currently on loan", and the others "In store". The records show the images online, so you can study them before you plan a visit.

The cat drawings at Tate

Tate in London holds three more drawings called Cat, each dated about 1904 to 1908, the years of Edgar Quinet. Tate lists each as graphite and watercolour on paper; graphite is the grey material inside a pencil. Tate's published collection data gives their sizes as 11.1 × 13.7 cm and 16.5 × 11.7 cm for the two bought in 1940, and 12.3 × 16 cm for the one given by Mary Constance Lloyd in 1957.

Tate's page on a past Gwen John display at Tate Britain says she moved to Meudon, a suburb of Paris, in 1911. It describes a simple life focused on her art, "her cats and her garden".

Life with cats in Meudon

The town of Meudon gives her addresses. She lived there from 1911 to 1939: on rue Terre Neuve until 1926, and then on rue Babie until 1 September 1939. She died in Dieppe on 18 September 1939.

Wales.com, the Welsh Government's site for the country, says she lived in Meudon alone with her cats. The Pallant House Gallery article sums up what the drawings show: with an eye for detail and flowing lines, she brought out the personality of each cat.

Girls and young women holding cats

John also painted people with cats. Tate owns Young Woman Holding a Black Cat, an oil on canvas that it dates about 1918 to 1922. Tate's collection data gives its size as 46 × 29.8 cm and records that the gallery bought it in 1946. The Tate Britain display text says she was known for painting in series, and her girls with cats exist in more than one version. Museum Wales holds a pencil drawing on the same subject, Girl with a cat (NMW A 3598), 22.5 × 15.6 cm.

Another version, Girl with a Cat, is at The Met in New York, an oil painting of 1918 to 1922, 33.7 × 26.7 cm, which is in our list of famous paintings of cats.

How she painted them

Museum Wales has studied how John built her paintings of seated women and girls. Its blog says she often painted "from the edges", starting at a corner of the canvas and working inwards, with the face painted last or not at all. She laid a ground, the first coat on the canvas, of chalk and animal glue, which leaves small bubbles and a rough surface. The paint on top went on dry and thin, so the sitter and the background blend into one surface. The blog on the studio collection adds that she mixed this chalky ground herself, and nobody knows her exact recipe.

Strange Beauties: the 2026 exhibition

Museum Wales opened Gwen John: Strange Beauties at National Museum Cardiff on 7 February 2026, for the 150th year since her birth. The museum called it the first major retrospective of her work in over forty years, meaning a show of her whole career. It ran in Cardiff until 28 June 2026 and then began a tour:

The Cardiffian, the news site of Cardiff University's journalism school, reported that the show brought together more than 200 paintings, drawings, watercolours and personal items. Its title comes from John's own description of herself, quoted by the museum's senior curator of art: "a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies, a diligent worker."

The cats had their own part. A photo caption in The Cardiffian identifies paintings of cats by John in the show, including Edgar. A free family trail, Through Edgar's Eyes, let children aged seven to 11 follow paw prints through the rooms. Museum Wales also ran a family painting event called Cats on 28 May 2026, "inspired by Gwen John's own love for cats".

Other artists and their cats

John drew her cats for herself. When the 2026 exhibition was announced, Museum Wales said many of her drawings and studio works had never been exhibited before. Other artists of her lifetime made cats a public part of their work: see our pages on Louis Wain's cat pictures, Steinlen's cats and Foujita's cats. For what cats have meant in paintings across cultures, read what cats mean in art.

A portrait of your own cat

Many of John's cat drawings show a tortoiseshell cat asleep, washing or sitting up, each one a study of an animal she lived with. A royal portrait of your own cat starts from the same place, a photo that shows its real markings. On Purrealism you choose one of 15 styles, from Maharaja and Mughal Emperor to Renaissance Royal and Victorian Noble, and upload one photo of up to 5 MB in the portrait studio. The cover of this page shows a Persian cat from the studio examples in the Maharaja style, and the gallery has more finished portraits.