Henriette Ronner-Knip: the Dutch painter of cats and kittens

Henriette Ronner-Knip (1821 to 1909) was a Dutch painter who spent most of her working life in Belgium and sold her pictures of cats and kittens to buyers in several countries. This page covers her life, from her training in her father's studio to her years in Brussels, the dogs she painted first, the way she worked with live cats, and where her paintings are today. The main sources are the Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland, a biographical dictionary of Dutch women published by the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Rijksmuseum, and two books from her own lifetime: a chapter by the Dutch writer Emile Wesly from 1898, and Frances Simpson's Book of the Cat from 1903. For other artists who painted cats, see the cats in art guide.

A family of painters

Henriette Knip was born in Amsterdam on 31 May 1821. Her father, Josephus Augustus Knip (1777 to 1847), painted animals and landscapes. Her mother was Cornelia van Leeuwen (1790 to 1848). The Vrouwenlexicon says Henriette was the third generation of artists in the family. Her grandfather Nicolaas Frederik Knip painted wallpaper and still lifes, and he trained her father, an uncle and an aunt as artists. The family moved often: to Paris, Vught, The Hague, Beek and Den Bosch, and in 1840 to Berlicum, in the Dutch province of North Brabant.

She started young. According to the Vrouwenlexicon, she had her own place in her father's studio from the age of four, and on her 11th birthday he gave her an easel.

Training in a blind father's studio

Emile Wesly wrote about her childhood in Het schildersboek, a book of chapters on 19th-century Dutch painters by people who knew them, published in 1898. His account is the family story as it was told in her lifetime.

Wesly says her father went blind at the age of 50 and could no longer paint. He did not want strangers to teach her, because he feared a school would spoil her own way of seeing, so he told her to use nature as her only model. After the gift of the easel, she had to work in his studio from first light until dark. Her only breaks were meals and two hours a day in a completely dark room, which her father hoped would protect her eyes from the illness that had ended his own career.

Her work soon earned money. Wesly says that at 15 she sent a small painting to an exhibition in Düsseldorf and it sold at once. The Vrouwenlexicon adds that from 1838 she sold work at the Dutch exhibitions of Living Masters, held each year in different cities, and that her sales helped to support the family after her father stopped painting.

In 1848, after both parents had died, she moved to Amsterdam. That year she became the first woman admitted as a "working member", the membership for practising artists, of Arti et Amicitiae, the city's society of artists.

Marriage and the move to Brussels

On 14 March 1850 she married Feico Ronner (1819 to 1883) in Amsterdam. The couple settled at once in Elsene, a district of Brussels. Wesly tells how it happened: she had been ill, and a doctor advised a change of air, so they set out for Switzerland. They stopped in Brussels to rest, liked it, and stayed. When Wesly wrote, she had lived there for 47 years and had still never seen Switzerland.

The first years were hard. Wesly says she started work in her studio at five each morning, and sometimes finished a small panel before her family woke up. She sold these for low prices because nobody in Brussels knew her yet. Her husband was often ill and did not work, so she earned the family's income. The Vrouwenlexicon says he handled the business side: letters, and sending paintings to exhibitions. After his death in 1883, their son Edouard took this over.

Dogs before cats

Her first success in Brussels came from dogs. The Vrouwenlexicon says she was influenced by the dog painter Joseph Stevens (1816 to 1892), who painted thin street dogs, and that she became fascinated by the dogs that pulled carts in the city. Wesly says she painted the milkmen's cart dogs for more than 15 years, and that art dealers then refused any other subject from her.

The best known of these is The Death of a Friend, shown in Brussels in 1860. A working man kneels to mourn his dog, which has died in the harness of his cart. Wesly writes that she painted four life-size dog heads, as studies for this picture, in a single morning. For the wider story of dogs in paintings, see our dogs in art guide.

The turn to cats

The Vrouwenlexicon says she began painting the cats that made her famous from 1870. Wesly, writing in 1898, says cats had been her main subject for more than 30 years. She set them in the rich rooms of well-off families, among fine furniture, fabrics and precious objects, and gave the paintings story titles such as The Music Lesson, with kittens playing on instruments, and Journey Around the World, with cats and a globe.

Writers of her time praised the same things. Wesly says each of her kittens had its own face and character, so that each one was a portrait of a particular animal. He also points to the mother cat, who watches her kittens at play, and says no other cat painter showed a mother's care as well. He compares her with the French cat painter Eugène Lambert, and so does Frances Simpson, who in 1903 described kittens pulling at old lace, scattering an artist's materials and dragging jewels from a casket. Simpson also noticed that almost all the fluffy kittens in her pictures have coats patched in several colours.

How she worked with live cats

Live cats move while an artist draws them. The Rijksmuseum explains that to draw the cats she used a special glass cage, and posed the animals inside it with cushions. Its example is The Musicians, a watercolour of around 1876 to 1877 in which a mother cat sits on a footstool with a kitten, while another kitten sits inside a guitar and two others play with its loose strings.

The Vrouwenlexicon says she practised drawing live cats in her studio for a long time, and that her special skill was the softness of their fur. Simpson's book prints a photograph titled "Madame Ronner at Work", taken by the photographer Alexandre of Brussels. Late in life her pictures changed. The Vrouwenlexicon says her compositions became simpler, with more attention on the cats and less on the room, and her colours became lighter under the influence of Impressionism. At 80 she still worked four to five hours a day in her Brussels studio.

Buyers, honours and a book

Her prices show her success. The Vrouwenlexicon says they rose from 200 guilders in the 1840s to more than 2,000 guilders in the 1880s, a sum that only the best-known painters could ask. She showed more than 168 paintings at the Living Masters exhibitions between 1838 and 1898, and also exhibited in Germany, England, France and America.

Royal buyers came too. Wesly lists them: Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany owned a painting of a cat defending itself against dogs, the Belgian royal family had several of her pictures, and five hung in the royal palace in Lisbon. The Duchess of Edinburgh bought a group of kittens sent to an exhibition in London, and the Princess of Wales bought another painting. Wesly says she painted lapdogs for the Queen of the Belgians and for the Countess of Flanders.

The two sources give different years for her Belgian knighthood in the Order of Leopold: Wesly says February 1877, and the Vrouwenlexicon says 1887. The Vrouwenlexicon adds that the Netherlands made her a knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1901. Wesly says the museums in Amsterdam, The Hague and Dordrecht bought her paintings, and the French government bought one of her studies in 1892.

In 1891 an album of her paintings appeared in three languages. Wesly says the Dutch text was by Johan Gram, the French by Henry Havard, and the English by M. H. Spielmann, editor of The Magazine of Art. It reproduced twelve of her newest paintings as photogravures, prints made from photographs etched into metal plates, by the firm Goupil. Simpson praised the English volume, with its "interesting account of her life and work" by Spielmann.

Her name also appears in the London cat show world. Simpson's list of officers of the National Cat Club names "Madame Ronner" as a vice-president, in the same list as Louis Wain, whose life is on our page about Louis Wain. The Book of the Cat opens with a picture of a black Persian cat "painted specially" by her for it.

Where to see her work

Cat with Kittens is signed "Henriette Knip 1844", her name before marriage. The Rijksmuseum describes Cat at Play as one of the scenes that made her one of the most successful Dutch artists of her time, and in 2026 its page listed it on display in room 1.14. A mezzotint is a print made from a metal plate roughened all over, so that it can print soft shades of dark and light; the two V&A prints were published in London in 1884. Tees Valley Museums say the five Hartlepool paintings are all titled Cat Study.

Her family and her last years

She trained all her children to paint, the Vrouwenlexicon says. Her son Alfred (1852 to 1901) became an illustrator, and her daughters Alice (1857 to 1957) and Emma (1860 to 1936) painted still lifes, pictures of flowers and objects. Wesly's chapter includes a charcoal portrait of her drawn by Alfred.

Henriette Ronner-Knip died in Elsene on 28 February 1909 and was buried in the family grave beside her husband. Sales of the contents of her studio followed in The Hague in March 1911 and in Amsterdam in October 1919. The Vrouwenlexicon says that art historians later found her kittens too sweet to take seriously, and her work spent years in museum storerooms. Interest returned with a large exhibition at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam in 1998, and in 2019 the Stedelijk Museum Vianen showed her cat portraits under the title Miauw.

Her cats and a portrait of your own

Wesly praised her because each of her kittens looks like one particular cat. A portrait of your own cat starts from the same point. The cat's own markings, face and coat colours matter most, and a clear photo taken in daylight shows them best. For what cats have meant in paintings over the centuries, read our page on cat symbolism in art.

Purrealism's Victorian Noble style dresses a cat as a well-born person of Ronner-Knip's own century. The cover of this page shows a Norwegian Forest Cat from the studio examples in that style. You can see more finished portraits in the gallery, or upload one photo of your own cat, up to 5 MB, in the portrait studio.