Famous paintings of cats: 10 works to know and where to see them

Cats have been in European and Japanese art for at least 500 years. This guide lists 10 works with cats, and each one was checked on the page of the museum that holds it. For every work you get the artist, the date the museum gives, where to find it, and what the cat is doing. Four are paintings. The other six are drawings and prints.

#	Work	Artist	Date	Museum
1	Cats, lions, and a dragon	Leonardo da Vinci	1517 to 1518	Royal Collection, Britain
2	The Large Cat	Cornelis Visscher	1657	Art Institute of Chicago
3	The Graham Children	William Hogarth	1742	National Gallery, London
4	The Okazaki Cat Demon	Utagawa Kuniyoshi	mid-1800s	The Met, New York
5	Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival	Utagawa Hiroshige	1857	Brooklyn Museum and Art Institute of Chicago
6	Olympia	Édouard Manet	1863	Musée d'Orsay, Paris
7	Woman with a Cat	Auguste Renoir	1870s	National Gallery of Art, Washington
8	A Kitten's Christmas Party	Louis Wain	1886	Victoria and Albert Museum, London
9	Tournée du Chat Noir	Théophile Alexandre Steinlen	1896	Los Angeles County Museum of Art
10	Girl with a Cat	Gwen John	1918 to 1922	The Met, New York

Some of these works are not always on display. In 2026 the museum pages listed the Visscher, Kuniyoshi, Renoir and Steinlen works as not on view, so check before you travel.

Two older cat works are covered in the guide to royal cats in history: the bronze cats of ancient Egypt, and Goya's portrait of a boy in red watched by three cats.

Cats drawn from life: Leonardo and Visscher

1. Leonardo da Vinci, Cats, lions, and a dragon (1517 to 1518)

Leonardo da Vinci filled one sheet with more than 20 small drawings of cats and lions, in black chalk, pen and ink, and wash (ink thinned with water). The Royal Collection Trust, which cares for the British royal art collection, dates it to 1517 to 1518. The cats sleep, sit, prowl, play and fight, and one frightened cat stands with a humped back and its fur on end. A lioness and a dragon share the sheet. The Trust says Leonardo's main interest was how the cat family bends and moves.

2. Cornelis Visscher, The Large Cat (1657)

This Dutch engraving, a print made from lines cut into a metal plate, shows one large cat. The Art Institute of Chicago calls it one of the softest pictures of a cat ever printed. A mouse creeps past a grate in the corner, and its fur is so light that it looks like a ghost. The museum says that in Visscher's culture cats were kept to kill pests, and it calls his cat a memorable portrait.

A cat in an English family portrait

3. William Hogarth, The Graham Children (1742)

The National Gallery in London holds this oil painting and shows it in Room 34. It shows the four children of Daniel Graham, apothecary (maker of medicines) to King George I and King George II, at life size.

The cat scrambles up the back of a chair with its claws out and startles a goldfinch in a gilded cage. The gallery explains why: the youngest child, Thomas, died while Hogarth was working on the painting, and the cat's sudden attack stands for the way death took him.

Cats in Japanese prints: Kuniyoshi and Hiroshige

Woodblock prints are pictures printed in ink and colour from carved wooden blocks.

4. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The Okazaki Cat Demon (mid-1800s)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds Kuniyoshi's Scene from a Ghost Story: The Okazaki Cat Demon, a diptych (two prints made to sit side by side). As the title says, the cat is a demon from a ghost story. Another Met page says Kuniyoshi was best known for prints of warriors, and was also a cat lover who made a number of works with cats. One is a set of three prints, Cats as Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road, published in 1849.

5. Utagawa Hiroshige, Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival (1857)

This print comes from Hiroshige's series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, the old name for Tokyo, and the Brooklyn Museum dates it to the 11th month of 1857. A cat sits on the windowsill of a second-floor room and looks out. Far away, a procession crosses the Asakusa rice fields for the Torinomachi Festival. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds another copy, says hairpins, tissue paper and a towel show that the room belongs to a courtesan, and that the cat may represent her.

Cats in French paintings: Manet and Renoir

6. Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863)

The Musée d'Orsay in Paris holds Olympia, which Manet signed and dated 1863. The oil painting is 130.5 cm tall and 191 cm wide. It shows a nude woman, a Black servant who offers her a bouquet of flowers, and a black cat.

Encyclopaedia Britannica says Manet based the picture on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538), a famous Renaissance nude. When Olympia was shown at the Salon of 1865, it caused a scandal. The Musée d'Orsay explains that Manet turned the goddess Venus into a modern prostitute who looks straight at the viewer. On 19 June 1865 the artist Honoré Daumier published a cartoon, now held by The Met, in which one visitor asks why the woman is called Olympia. The other answers that perhaps it is the name of the black cat.

7. Auguste Renoir, Woman with a Cat (1870s)

The National Gallery of Art in Washington dates this oil painting to the 1870s. It is 56 by 46.4 cm. A young woman in a white and blue dress sits in a burgundy armchair and hugs a brown and black striped cat. She holds it upright against her body, so its head rests on her cheek, and she looks at it with dark eyes.

Artists who made cats their main subject

8. Louis Wain, A Kitten's Christmas Party (1886)

Louis Wain was born on 5 August 1860 and died on 4 July 1939. Bethlem Museum of the Mind says he became famous for his pictures of cats, which were popular from the 1880s until the First World War. His cats did what people do: they played cricket, dug up roads, rode bicycles and made after-dinner speeches.

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds A Kitten's Christmas Party, eleven drawings of kittens on one sheet, in wash and pencil. Wain made them for the Christmas Number of the Illustrated London News in 1886.

Wain later became mentally ill. He spent 1925 to 1930 at Bethlem Hospital and kept drawing until near the end of his life. Bethlem Museum of the Mind now holds 56 of his works.

9. Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, Tournée du Chat Noir (1896)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art says Steinlen was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, worked in France, and lived from 1859 to 1923. Encyclopaedia Britannica explains the name linked to him: Le Chat Noir, "The Black Cat", was the house magazine of the world's first cabaret, and Steinlen drew cats for its wordless comic strips from 1884 to 1886.

His printed poster Tournée du Chat Noir, from 1896, is 134.3 cm tall. In the museum's photograph, a black cat with yellow eyes sits upright on a red panel, with a red circle behind its head.

10. Gwen John, Girl with a Cat (1918 to 1922)

The Met holds Girl with a Cat, a small oil painting by Gwen John, 33.7 by 26.7 cm, dated 1918 to 1922. The Met says John was born in Haverfordwest, Wales, in 1876 and died in Dieppe, France, in 1939. Tate in London holds more of her cats, including Young Woman Holding a Black Cat, dated between 1918 and 1922.

How a modern cat portrait follows these works

A pet portrait is a picture of one particular animal, and the guide to what pet portraits are traces how painters made them for patrons. Hogarth, Manet, Renoir and Gwen John painted a cat next to a person. Leonardo, Visscher, Wain and Steinlen made cats the whole subject. Our guide to cats in art goes deeper into each of these artists and traditions, from Egyptian bronzes to Foujita's Paris studio.

A royal portrait from Purrealism puts your own cat at the centre and dresses it as a ruler. The gallery shows three cats:

• a white and ginger cat as a Maharani, in a green and gold gown
• a grey cat as a Mughal emperor, wearing a jewelled crown and pearls
• a ginger cat in a red and gold royal robe, in the Indian Royalty style

Like Renoir's striped cat or Manet's black cat, each one is a single animal with its own coat and face. In the portrait studio you choose one of 15 royal styles and add one clear photo of your cat, saved as an image file of up to 5 MB.