Manet's cats: the Champfleury prints, his cat Zizi and Woman with a Cat

Édouard Manet (1832 to 1883) painted one of the most famous cats in art, and he also drew and etched cats and sketched his own cat at home. This page covers the cats beyond his best-known painting: the poster and prints he made for Champfleury's book Les Chats in 1868 and 1869, his pencil sketches of his own cat Zizi, and the late portrait of his wife Suzanne with Zizi asleep on her lap. It also looks at what Champfleury's book said about cats in art, using the English translation of 1885. For cats by other artists, start with the cats in art guide.

Olympia's black cat, in brief

Manet's best-known cat is the black cat in his painting Olympia. Its date, its museum and the reaction to it are covered in our list of famous paintings of cats. The National Gallery in London names Olympia and Luncheon in the Studio, now in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, as two of his most important paintings with cats. The rest of this page is about the cats he drew for himself and for a friend's book.

Champfleury and his book about cats

Champfleury was the pen name of Jules Husson Fleury (1821 to 1889). A British Library curator, Chris Michaelides, describes him as a novelist and story writer who supported the painter Gustave Courbet and the realist style. He also wrote about pantomime, caricature, popular prints, Japanese prints and ceramics, and for the last 17 years of his life he was curator at the Sèvres national porcelain factory.

The British Library calls his book on cats his most popular work and dates it to 1869. The Musée d'Orsay gives 1868 to 1869, and says it followed an earlier French book on cats by Paradis de Moncrif, published in 1727. The full title was Les Chats: histoire, mœurs, observations, anecdotes (Cats: history, habits, observations, stories). The book sold so well that it was reprinted twice in quick succession. Two deluxe editions followed in 1870 with extra texts and pictures.

The British Library says the first editions had 23 short chapters and the deluxe editions 34. They cover cats in ancient civilizations, popular traditions, heraldry, art and literature, with chapters on the friends, enemies and painters of cats. Pictures came from many sources. The frontispiece, the picture that faces the title page, was a drawing by the Swiss artist Gottfried Mind. Several small pictures at the ends of chapters were copied from a sheet of cat studies by Hiroshige, which Champfleury wrongly credited to Hokusai. The book also gave pride of place to Victor Hugo and his cat Chanoine.

The Art Institute of Chicago holds a copy of the 1870 edition, 22.9 cm tall. Its record lists original prints by Manet and pictures copied from works by Delacroix, Gottfried Mind, Hiroshige, Cornelis Visscher and Grandville, among others.

Le Rendez-vous des chats, 1868

Manet's first contribution was a poster. The Musée d'Orsay says that in 1868 he made the advertising poster for Champfleury's book. The British Library explains that the poster carried a lithograph by Manet, Le Rendez-vous des chats (The cats' rendezvous). A lithograph is a print made from a drawing on stone. It shows two cats courting on a rooftop.

The British Library suggests that the black cat in it was a reminder of the cat in Olympia. The same image was used on the poster for the second edition a few months later, and a copy of it was printed inside the book.

The Art Institute of Chicago holds a copy of the lithograph, dated 1868. It is printed in black on ivory paper, mounted on cloth, and the image is 43.9 cm tall and 33.4 cm wide. In September 2026 the museum listed it as not on view.

The picture fits the book's words. In the English translation of 1885, the image appears with the caption "The Cats' Rendez-vous. From a composition by Edouard Manet", just before the chapter called Cats in Love. In that chapter Champfleury describes a male and a female cat he kept in his house. After days of ignoring each other, he writes, the two cats go off together to the next room, or to the housetop.

Cat and Flowers, 1869

For the deluxe editions, Manet added an etching, a print made from lines drawn into a coated metal plate and then bitten into the metal with acid. The British Library says Le Chat et les fleurs (Cat and Flowers) shows a cat on a balcony near a ceramic jardinière, a large decorative plant pot. It calls the image influenced by Japanese prints, and also a reference to Champfleury's interest in ceramics. The print appeared in the fifth edition of Les Chats, in 1870.

Several museums hold copies, dated 1869:

• The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Its label says Manet had a lifelong interest in still life, and that he combined etching and aquatint, a method that prints flat areas of tone, to show a cat prowling among flowers. The image is 19.69 by 13.97 cm.
• Yale University Art Gallery. Etching and aquatint, with a platemark of 20.3 by 15.2 cm. Manet signed it in the plate, at the lower left.
• Princeton University Art Museum. An etching on Rives paper, dated around 1869, with a plate of 19.5 by 15 cm.

To see how French artists in Paris looked at Japanese art, read our page on cats in Japanese woodblock prints.

The Cats, a plate of sketches

Manet also made a cat print that he never published. The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney dates The Cats to 1868 to 1869. It shows three cats in different poses. One is a flat silhouette filled with curved strokes, and the others are drawn in broken outline. The gallery says the off-centre layout was shaped by Japanese woodblock prints, which were easy to find in Paris. It adds that Manet began drawing cats for Champfleury's book, then made this plate for his own amusement. The print stayed unpublished in his lifetime and was printed only after his death.

Two American museums also hold it. The Art Institute of Chicago's copy is an etching and aquatint, with an image 17.3 by 21.8 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art's copy, an etching with a platemark of 17.3 by 21.5 cm, was a gift of Ralph King in 1922.

Zizi, Manet's own cat

Manet's own cat was called Zizi. The Musée d'Orsay calls her "sa chatte", a female cat. In 2023 the museum showed sketches of her, made around 1880, in a small display of cat drawings by Manet and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen. It says Manet reused some of these sketches in watercolours that decorated his letters. Steinlen, the Montmartre artist who drew cats for the Chat Noir cabaret, has his own page in this guide.

The drawings belong to the Musée d'Orsay and are kept in the drawings department of the Louvre. The Louvre's online catalogue lists them one by one. Two examples:

• Chat assis, de dos (seated cat, seen from behind). Graphite on squared paper, 8.5 by 11.5 cm.
• Chat noir ; tête de chat (black cat; cat's head). Graphite, 10.2 by 7.8 cm.

Both were bought in 1954, and the catalogue gives Galerie Charpentier, a Paris gallery, as their last owner. The catalogue says the drawings were bought in five assembled albums and later remounted, and that they carry the stamp "EM".

Woman with a Cat: Suzanne and Zizi

Manet's last portrait of his wife shows Zizi too. Woman with a Cat belongs to Tate, which bought it in 1918, and in September 2026 it hung in Room 43 of the National Gallery in London. It is an oil painting on canvas, 92.1 by 73 cm. The National Gallery dates it to around 1880 to 1882, and Tate's own record gives around 1880.

The National Gallery describes the scene. A middle-aged woman, lost in thought, sits on a couch in the corner of a room. A black and white cat sleeps on her lap. The woman is Suzanne Leenhoff, an accomplished musician. She and Manet met when she became his piano teacher; she was 19 and he was 22. They married in 1863.

The gallery points out where Manet spent his effort. The blue strokes across Suzanne's chest are quick and loose. Her face and hair are more finished. The cat's fur and its moody face have the densest brushwork and the most complex mix of colours. The gallery says cats fascinated Manet, and that he sketched and painted Zizi several times.

The picture seems to be unfinished. A grey first layer of paint covers the whole canvas and shows through in many places, and there is no signature. The gallery thinks Manet painted it for personal reasons, and says he may still have been working on it when he died in 1883.

What Champfleury wrote about painters of cats

Champfleury's book reached English readers in 1885, as The Cat Past and Present, translated by Mrs Cashel Hoey and published in London by George Bell and Sons. A copy digitized by the Wellcome Library is free to read on the Internet Archive. Chapter 15, Painters of Cats, gives his view of cats in art:

• Egypt. He says Egyptian artists showed the cat both as a sacred animal and as a household animal, with equal skill. Our page on ancient Egyptian cat art looks at those objects.
• Japan. "Next to the Egyptians," he writes, "the Japanese are, par excellence, painters of the cat."
• Gottfried Mind. He calls the Swiss artist "the Raphael of Cats" and praises his many pen sketches.
• Cornelis Visscher. He praises the Dutch printmaker's "marvellous tomcat" and adds that only two copies of the engraving were known to him. Other artists who put cats in family portraits, he complains, seem to have found their models in toy shops.
• Eugène Delacroix. He says Delacroix studied cats again and again in his sketchbooks but put none in his paintings, because "Delacroix made tigers of his cats": their striped fur and graceful stretching became his models for tigers.
• Grandville. He says Grandville studied the cat's face more closely than anyone.

The chapter also says: "Nothing is so difficult to paint as the cat's face."

Manet's cats at a glance

From Manet's Zizi to a portrait of your cat

In Woman with a Cat, Manet put his most careful brushwork into one particular cat's fur and face. A portrait of your own cat depends on the same two things. A clear photo that shows your cat's face and coat colours gives the portrait what it needs. What cats have meant in paintings, from a sign of home to a witch's companion, is the subject of our page on cat symbolism in art.

The cover of this page shows a Siamese cat from the studio examples, painted in the Victorian Noble style. Purrealism offers 15 royal styles, from Indian Royalty to Regency Era, as a digital download or an art print in four sizes. You can see finished portraits in the gallery, or upload one photo of up to 5 MB in the portrait studio.