u/tatacolt

Suzanne Valadon had one of the more unusual biographies in French modern art. She was born Marie Clémentine Valadon, worked as a circus acrobat as a teenager, then became a model for artists such as Renoir, Toulouse Lautrec and Puvis de Chavannes.

Instead of staying on the model’s side of the studio, she watched, learned, and eventually became a serious painter herself. Degas admired her work and bought several of her early pieces. In 1894, she also became the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

Her private life was quite colorful as well. Erik Satie was so overwhelmed by their brief affair that he reportedly kept a small room almost like a shrine to her. Later she married André Utter, a painter more than twenty years younger, and with her son Maurice Utrillo they became known as the “infernal trio” of Montmartre.

Raminou was her own cat, and not a one time studio prop. There is something very funny about Valadon’s life being so dramatic and unconventional, while Raminou’s contribution to modern art was simply to sit on expensive fabric with the face of someone who has never paid rent and never intends to.

Peter de Sève is an American illustrator and character designer, trained at the Art Students League and Parsons School of Design. He is best known for his many New Yorker covers and for character design in animation, including Ice Age, Mulan, A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo. He has also received multiple awards, including an Emmy Award for Outstanding Character Design.

Animals seem to have been his natural subject from the beginning. As a child he kept a small menagerie of reptiles, amphibians, birds and little mammals, and as a teenager he worked in a pet shop. So a shop window full of cats, with one small black kitten quietly auditioning for a supernatural career, feels like the perfect use of his well earned animal expertise.

The Society of Illustrators described de Sève as an observer, craftsman and comedian, which is probably the right combination for this image. It is not just a witch finding a cat. It is a cat finding the one person in town who may finally appreciate his professional qualifications.

Ekaterina Kachura-Falileeva belonged to the generation of Russian Empire artists whose lives were later reshaped by Revolution and emigration. She was born in Warsaw, studied in Odessa and St. Petersburg, worked as both a painter and a printmaker, and in 1924 left Soviet Russia with her husband, artist Vadim Falileev, for an exhibition in Stockholm. They never returned, later living in Berlin and Rome.

The painting is a Russian tea scene, with the samovar, fruit, embroidered cloth, bright shawl and garden arranged almost like a memory of domestic life. It is not just a decorative idyll. The woman, the beautiful white mother cat and her kitten are all looking beyond the painting, toward something we cannot see. Knowing the artist’s difficult life, and the old association of cats with intuition and foresight, it is hard not to read this shared gaze as a hint of premonition.

Paws and Fins, 2026

Chatchawarn Ruksa, born in 1970, is a Thai watercolor artist from Nong Khai whose work has become recognizable both in Thailand and internationally, and is also very loved online. He is also an art teacher, has served as a watercolor competition judge, and is President of the International Watercolor Society North Eastern Thailand.

He did not begin with cats. He studied accounting, worked in business, became an art teacher, painted landscapes, people and still life, and even created a painting of Our Lady of Perpetual Help on gold leaf for Saint Alphonsus Church in Nong Khai, a work he described with particular pride. But cats were the subject that finally brought him the most joy.

His first cat painting apparently began when a schoolgirl asked him to paint her cat. Later, his own first cat came into his life in a rather sad way: someone gave him a cat, but through inexperience he lost it. After that, a stray cat came to his home with four kittens, and the mother stayed, becoming one of the models he could observe every day. His cat exhibitions have also helped raise money for stray cats, so there is something truly precious behind all these fluffy little faces.

And here, after all that art, teaching, church painting and charity, we arrive at the eternal truth: the fishy is visible, the paw is ready, and peace was never really an option.

Tokuhiro Kawai is a contemporary Japanese surrealist painter, and cats seem to be one of his favourite ways of making the world look both mysterious and completely ridiculous.

Here they are surrounded by ideas, but their ideas are exactly what one would expect: fish, flower, meat. Very solemn and very symbolic, at least in catspeak.

He is also known for a much newer cycle called Altarpiece of Cat Adoration. It does not really fit this subreddit’s date rules, but if you like this style, it is absolutely worth googling.

Vanessa Stockard’s cat Kevin has located the rarest possible fishy: a mermaid. The technique is bold, direct, and completely illegal for anybody except a charming piece of black fluff.
She is an Australian painter who works in oil on canvas and similar traditional supports. Vanessa is especially loved online for sending her black cat Kevin into art history, mythology, interiors, and every possible place where he absolutely should not be touching things.

Thomas Sully was one of America’s great portraitists. He painted presidents, the Andrew Jackson image that later shaped the U.S. $20 bill, and even Queen Victoria. His Victoria portrait was unusually lively for a royal image: she is shown turning, almost as if someone has just caught her attention.

So it feels rather fitting that Sully also chose Cinderella before her own royal transformation. Not at the ball, not with the slipper, not beside the prince. Just by the kitchen fire, while her stepsisters prepare in the background. She is still a servant in the house, but Sully already paints her with the tenderness and dignity of someone who will one day become a queen.

And of course, she has the cat. Beautiful, calm, and very much on her side. The painting now belongs to the Dallas Museum of Art, whose former curator remembered being struck by the “great big wonderful orange and white cat.” She must have had the same gentle, fascinated expression as Cinderella looking at her little friend, and as the rest of us scrolling through cats in art.

Cinderella gets the prince later. For now, she has the cat, which may be the better company anyway.

Abraham Teniers came from the famous Flemish Teniers family, where comic genre scenes clearly ran in the blood. He never became as famous as his brother David Teniers the Younger, but he clearly knew exactly how to stage these tiny absurd worlds, crowded, theatrical and somehow completely convincing.

He was especially fond of singeries, paintings where monkeys imitate human life. Here they are running a proper barbershop, which in the 17th century meant not only haircuts and shaving, but also small medical treatments. So the cats are not just being groomed. They are apparently receiving highly professional care, just as they should.

There is also a clothed cat standing in the doorway, giving very strong early Puss in Boots energy, even though Perrault’s famous version would only appear later, in 1697. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna does not identify him as such, but he certainly looks like a cat who could invent a title or two and take over the whole barbershop before lunch.

Nikolai Bodarevsky was a Russian painter and a rather controversial member of the Peredvizhniki, known for portraits and elegant genre scenes. He was popular with wealthy clients, especially ladies, but not exactly loved by some of his fellow artists. One of them wrote rather mercilessly that Bodarevsky flattered his sitters, made them younger and prettier, and painted fashionable dresses with almost illusionistic precision.

Well, I side with the public of his time and absolutely adore this painting. The wealthy cat must have paid quite handsomely, since it is clearly the very detailed true heart of the scene.

Painted by the Ming emperor Xuanzong himself, this scroll shows two very soft cats beneath garden flowers and rocks. The cats were painted with the “boneless” method, using colour washes first, then fine lines for the fur. It imitates the cat painting style of Song dynasty (12th century) artist Li Di.

An Oyster Supper

Horatio Henry Couldery

1882

William James Webbe, The Collared Thief, 1860. Fine china, fresh milk, and exotic lemons must have cost a fortune. But tha face is priceless.

Shen Zhenlin was a Qing dynasty (the last imperial dynasty of China) court painter during the Xianfeng and Tongzhi reigns, 1851 to 1874.

This hanging scroll is in the National Palace Museum, Taipei

Henriëtte Ronner-Knip, Cheese lovers, 19th century. She painted many cat scenes, and this one feels especially fun: a mother cat teaching her two kittens the cheese craft, while the lion heads on the chair seem split on the lesson, one stern and almost sorrowful, the other quietly approving