Cats in art and history

People have made pictures of cats for a very long time. Some show a cat just as it is. Others dress it up, give it a story or put it on a stage. Museums look after many of these pictures and figures, and a good number can be seen online.

Cats in ancient Egypt

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds several small cat figures from ancient Egypt. Most are cast in bronze or copper alloy, and one is carved from wood.

The museum dates them to the Late Period and the Ptolemaic Period, between 664 and 30 BCE.

One leaded bronze figure is catalogued as a cat statuette intended to contain a mummified cat. It comes from the Ptolemaic Period, 332 to 30 BCE.

A cat in a family portrait

William Hogarth painted The Graham Children in 1742. It hangs in the National Gallery in London.

The painting shows the four children of Daniel Graham. Behind them, a cat scrambles up the back of a chair with its claws. It startles a goldfinch in a cage above.

The gallery's notes say the youngest child, Thomas, had already died while Hogarth was working on the picture. They read the cat as a sign of how suddenly death came for him.

Cats in clothes

Louis Wain drew cats who behave like people. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London holds many of his drawings.

His drawings A Kitten's Christmas Party appeared in the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News in 1886.

One drawing from about 1905 shows two cats in bow ties. They are watching a cow in a field, and the cow is wearing bloomers.

A design for a book cover from around the same time, By Road & Rail in Catland, shows a car full of cats. More cats travel by train behind them.

In 1905 Wain drew a series about a cat's nine lives for Lloyd's Weekly News. The V&A notes that his own cat, Peter the Great, gave him the idea.

The V&A dates Beatrix Potter's drawing of a cat knitting to around the 1890s, before she published her books. The V&A keeps the sheet, with a second study of the cat's head beside it.

Artists who drew and modelled cats

Gwen John made several drawings and watercolours of cats. The V&A holds her watercolour of a seated cat, painted around 1904 to 1908.

The museum dates it from its likeness to her other pictures of her cat, Edgar Quinet. Its notes say the picture captures the cat's remote self-possession and unconcern.

Randolph Caldecott is best known as an illustrator. In 1874 he made a life-sized terracotta cat, crouching with its head forward as if to spring.

The V&A says he modelled it from the skeleton of a cat, a dead cat and a live cat.

A cat on the stage

The artist Larionov designed a costume for the cat in the ballet Kikimora. The ballet was first danced at the Teatro Victoria Eugenia in San Sebastian, Spain, on 25 August 1916.

Kikimora was one of four short ballets based on Russian folk tales. The V&A explains that together they made up Les Contes russes.

Useful links