u/tatacolt

Arthur Heyer was trained at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin and began as an illustrator before moving to Budapest in 1896. That background shows in his animal paintings: the poses are clear, the scene is readable, and even a toy ball is enough to make the cats look as if something very important has just happened.

Angoras had a wonderfully overqualified history for such fluffy creatures. At Versailles, Louis XV adored his white Angora Brillant, who reportedly sat on the mantelpiece during Royal Council sessions. Under Louis XVI, court Angoras were still causing trouble: one story has the king using his commode without realising that an Angora cat was curled up inside the porcelain bowl below. The cat attacked from underneath, and the king fled in panic, stockings in hand.

Heyer’s own white Angoras were painted so often that he became known as “Katzen-Heyer”, or “Cat Heyer”. His technique suited the subject especially well: the cats look white at first glance, but their fur is built from cream, grey, bluish shadow and warmer reflected light, which keeps the softness from turning into a flat white mass.

He was treated as a serious and talented artist in his own time. Heyer exhibited in Budapest, Weimar, Gotha, Vienna’s Künstlerhaus and Munich’s Glaspalast, received the Hungarian Count Andrássy Prize in 1911, was appointed professor in 1915, and after his death in Budapest was honoured with a state funeral.

Julius Anton Adam belonged to a Munich family of artists, many of them better known for horses, battles and hunting scenes. His own route was stranger. At fourteen he left for Rio de Janeiro to work as a landscape photographer and retoucher in his father’s photographic business. After almost six years he came back to Munich, reportedly driven home by homesickness.

He studied at the Munich Academy and first tried genre painting, but from the 1880s cats took over. By 1887 he had a contract with an art dealer that kept him painting for clients for five years, and in 1894 a Munich publication appeared under the title Vom Kätzchen, or About the Kitten, with reproductions of his cat paintings and sketches.

His reputation became so tied to cats that people called him Katzenadam, meaning “Cats Adam,” and even Katzenraffael, “the Raphael of cats.” The names are funny, but they also say something about how recognisable his work had become.

It is hard to imagine a better professional signature for him: the artist, formally presented to the public, surrounded by the cat overlords that had taken over his career.

Timothy Adam Matthews is a British oil painter known mostly for cats in small domestic scenes. In 2015 he won his category in the BBC Little Painting Challenge with a postcard sized portrait of his baby son.

In the Pink is from 2021. The fish is already mounted on the wall, but the cat seems unconvinced that this should count as the end of the hunt.

Paweł Kuczyński is a Polish satirical illustrator, born in Szczecin in 1976. He studied graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań and began working seriously in satirical drawing in 2004.

His pictures are probably more famous than his name. They have travelled everywhere online: political, philosophy, anti-war, motivational pages, sometimes with credit and sometimes without it. Galleries describe him as one of the most awarded contemporary satirical artists, with more than 170 international prizes.

What makes his work so recognisable is the very simple visual language. He often uses animals, children, toys, balloons, little boats and other almost innocent things, then turns them into comments on war, power, poverty, technology or human vanity.

Cats are perfect for him because they already look like diplomats from a morally unstable country. Calm, elegant, silent, and absolutely not to be trusted.

Gottfried Mind was a Swiss artist from Bern, remembered in the nineteenth century as the “Raphael of Cats.” The British Museum describes him as an animal and genre painter, and his name survived largely through the cat drawings.

Mind’s biography is unusually difficult and interesting. The British Museum identifies him as autistic, although this modern label should be treated carefully. Older sources used cruel medical words for him, and several accounts say that he developed a goiter early in life. In Alpine regions of that period, goiter and what was then called “cretinism” were strongly associated with iodine deficiency, a condition now largely preventable through iodized salt and proper nutrition.

He remained mostly illiterate, struggled to write even his own name, and lacked basic arithmetic skills. Early accounts also describe his extraordinary visual memory. He could observe animals closely, make only a few strokes, and later recreate posture, movement and expression with remarkable accuracy.

Mind also made genre scenes of children and everyday Swiss life, many of them small works connected with the Bernese print tradition in which he was trained. His reputation became especially attached to cats, and Champfleury later placed one of his cat studies at the front of Les chats in 1868, bringing Mind into the nineteenth century French literary world of cat lovers and collectors.

The best anecdote about him is wonderfully specific. While Mind worked, a cat might sit on his shoulder or back, another on the table, and sometimes kittens lay in his lap. He was said to keep awkward positions for hours rather than disturb them.

This painting shows Mind’s gift for feline character as much as anatomy. The calmly grooming cat is caught with its paw lifted, while the second one looks attentive and inquisitive, as if it has suddenly noticed us.

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.