Cats in Famous Paintings and What They Were Doing There
A cat in an old painting is almost never decoration. Manet put a black cat at the foot of Olympia’s bed in 1863 and every critic in Paris understood the insult immediately, because the cat was doing work that a dog in the same spot could not have done.
Below are the cats in famous paintings worth knowing, what each was there to say, and the one famous story about a cat artist that turns out to have been assembled by someone else entirely.
Manet’s Olympia and the Cat That Caused a Scandal
Olympia, painted in 1863 and now in the Musée d’Orsay, takes its composition directly from Titian’s Venus of Urbino of around 1534. Titian put a sleeping dog at the foot of the bed. Manet replaced it with an upright black cat.
That swap is the whole argument. A sleeping dog signals fidelity and domestic calm. A black cat, standing alert with its tail up, sat alongside the orchid in her hair and the shawl beneath her as a symbol of wealth and sensuality, and the audience read the woman as a courtesan rather than a goddess.
Cats carried that association for centuries in European art. If you want to know what a painter thought of the woman in the picture, look at what animal is on the bed with her.
Kuniyoshi, Who Drew Cats as People
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, who lived from 1798 to 1861, was one of the last great masters of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock printing, and cats sit alongside samurai, scenery and kabuki actors in his subject list.
His cat prints are the opposite of the European tradition. Where Manet used a cat as a symbol pointed at a person, Kuniyoshi drew cats as the people: dressed, gossiping, performing kabuki roles, arranged into the shapes of written characters. He kept cats himself, reportedly many of them at once, and it shows in the drawing.
Anyone who has watched a cat fold itself into a loaf recognises the poses. He was working from life.
Steinlen and the Poster Everyone Owns
The black cat on the Le Chat Noir poster is probably the most reproduced cat in art, hanging in student flats and cafés more than a century after it was made. Théophile Steinlen made it after moving to Montmartre, where he fell in with the crowd at the Le Chat Noir cabaret and picked up poster commissions.
The design works because it is anatomically honest. The ears are set wide and high, the pupils are blown fully open the way a cat’s are in low light, and the posture is a real sitting cat rather than a heraldic invention.
Louis Wain and the Sequence That Was Never Real
Louis Wain is the answer to the question of which artist is most famous for painting cats. H. G. Wells said of him in 1925 that he had made the cat his own, inventing a cat style, a cat society and a whole cat world, and English cats that did not live like Wain cats were ashamed of themselves.
He is better known now for something that is probably not true.
The famous sequence, printed in psychology textbooks for decades, shows Wain’s cats dissolving from recognisable animals into kaleidoscopic abstractions and is presented as a visual record of schizophrenia taking hold. That sequence was assembled in 1939 by a psychiatrist named Walter Maclay, who found some Wain paintings in a shop on Campden Hill and arranged them in an order he believed showed deterioration. The paintings were not dated. He chose the order.
The theory has since been challenged on straightforward evidence: while at Napsbury hospital, Wain was producing work in his old naturalistic style at the same time as the abstract designs, so there is no progression to read. A cat expert writing in The Guardian for Wain’s centenary suggested his breakdown followed a head injury rather than a slow decline.
The abstract work is now treated as an important precursor to 1960s psychedelic art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum gave him a major exhibition in 1972.
Why Cats Appear at All
Cats enter European painting late and enter it loaded. They arrive attached to witchcraft, to prostitution, to independence from a household’s authority, and painters used them precisely because a viewer would supply that meaning without being told.
The shift to cats as beloved pets in art tracks the shift in real households. Once cats moved from the barn to the parlour, painters started drawing them asleep on laps rather than staring out of the canvas, and the symbolic charge drained away within a couple of generations.
For cats that lived rather than posed, see famous cats in history. For the twentieth-century descendants of these painted cats, see famous cartoon cats.
FAQ
What are the most famous cats in paintings?
Among cats in famous paintings, the black cat in Manet’s Olympia of 1863 is the most discussed, followed by Steinlen’s Le Chat Noir cabaret poster and the cat prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Each was made for a different purpose: symbol, advertisement, and affectionate caricature.
Which artist is most famous for painting cats?
Louis Wain is the artist most associated with cats, having built an entire anthropomorphic cat world in British illustration from the 1880s onward. Utagawa Kuniyoshi holds the equivalent position in Japanese art.
Do Louis Wain’s paintings really show his schizophrenia?
The famous progression is unreliable, because the paintings were undated and a psychiatrist arranged them into that order in 1939. Wain continued producing naturalistic cat paintings alongside the abstract ones, which leaves no sequence to trace.
Why are cats in old paintings so often black?
Black carried the strongest symbolic charge in European painting, linking a cat to witchcraft, night, and sexual independence. It also reads cleanly against pale skin and bedding, which is exactly the contrast Manet exploited in Olympia.
