How cats have inspired artists from da Vinci to Warhol

If you walked into Andy Warhol’s studio in 1954, you’d likely be greeted by a cat named Sam. Then another cat named Sam. And then another. After a cat his mother brought home birthed a litter of kittens, Warhol kept them all and named the whole lot Sam.

If you stop by Ai Weiwei’s Beijing studio today, you’d weave your way through at least 40 cats.

On the wilder side, Salvador Dali once kept a pet ocelot, which he took aboard a luxury ocean liner to France.

The domestic cat has stalked among us for thousands of years and has made appearances in art for just about as long. They’re iconoclasts: a confounding mixture of loving companion and needle-clawed snob, traits people either adore or disdain. Unlike dogs, who obey us with fevered adoration, cats choose domesticity on their own terms and shun assigned tasks (although they are usually obliging mousers).

This dichotomy might be what makes them appealing as art studio mates and subject matter, for artists seem to enjoy capturing what resists pinning down. Kate Flint, Provost Professor of Art History at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, takes us through some of the felines that have made their mark on art.

Mew-thologies

“Egyptian statuettes are probably the best-known examples of what are clearly now domestic cats,” says Flint.

Egyptians worshiped Bastet, the cat goddess of domesticity, fertility and women’s intuition, for thousands of years. They erected an entire temple to her filled with nearly 600 cat statues and produced endless amulets and figurines. A Bastet statute in The Metropolitan Museum of Art is intricately adorned with precious metals and ornate colors, lotus blossoms carved into the base.

Devotional cat statuary isn’t just limited to the African continent. While settling at the counter of a sushi bar, you might catch a small paw waving at you. The red-eared Maneki Neko cat figurine, ubiquitous in Japan and Japanese establishments abroad, are thought to summon rain, which pushes customers into shops, thus generating more sales.

Their origin story comes from the 17th century, when a poor monk shared his meals with a stray cat at his temple. One day during a storm a local lord, Lord Nakaota, paused for shelter beneath a large tree. As he waited out the rain, he noticed a small cat beckoning to him from the doorstep of the temple. Leaving the tree to take a closer look, he was saved from a thunderbolt that came down exactly on the spot he had stood previously. In gratitude to the cat, Lord Nakaota became the temple’s patron, and the building remains open for visitors to this day.

“That particular temple is still for cat worship and you can buy little figurines of those waving cats there,” says Flint.

Fur-miliar Friends

Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019

Other cats have been immortalized for less mystical reasons. Says Flint, “There must have been cats hanging around Leonardo da Vinci’s studio because he did a lot of sketches of cats, just an ordinary tabby cat sitting, sleeping and washing itself.”

John Everett Millais’ black cat Eel Eye makes an appearance in his 1870 work The Flood. Inspired by the Great Sheffield flood that killed nearly 250 people when a dam burst overnight in Sheffield, England in 1864, the painting shows a baby lying placidly in a cradle as it’s swept away in the deluge. At the infant’s foot, Eel Eye yowls in terror. The animal’s scream seems to emulate our own fear at the fate awaiting the baby, who floats by chillingly unperturbed.

As for Warhol’s many Sams, they were put to paper in two books: 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy and Holy Cats By Andy Warhol’s Mother. He also used the cats in early tests for his famous screen prints but never released them out of fear that the subject matter would make the final works appear too childish.

“He didn’t want these [cat] prints to be known out there on the broader market because he thought that they would diminish his status as avant-garde,” Flint says.

Endless paw-sibilities  

What exactly cats signify in art seems nearly as diverse as the variety of cat breeds. For some artists, they represent the domestic and homespun, hence Warhol’s distaste for using them in projects he regarded as destined for greater things. To Picasso, cats symbolized feral femininity, and he painted them slashing, wild-eyed, into birds and lobsters. Victorians placed them in sentimental portraits of children as expressions of innocence.

In The Awakening Conscience, painted by Holman Hunt in 1853, the cat’s significance encourages endless speculation. A woman sits on the lap of a man at a piano, a look of sudden realization on her face.

“On the left-hand side of the picture is a fairly fetching tabby cat with a bird that it’s caught,” says Flint. “You don’t know if that bird is dinner or that bird is going to fly up and head off into the garden. Similarly, you don’t know whether the woman is being caught by the guy and whether she’s going to escape or not.”

Visitors to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris crowd daily around Manet’s arresting Olympia, in which a nude courtesan reclines in bed, a black cat at her feet. Behind the cat stands the woman’s black servant, holding a large bouquet of flowers. Flint ponders how the servant and cat, so closely positioned, could actually reveal the racism of the era.

“If you take it as signifying the tradition of black cats representing dark forces, what does that then do to the skin color of the maid? Or if you think of it as a domestic animal, does that also turn the maid into a domestic animal? What’s the relationship between the dark of the cat and the dark skin color of the woman there?”

Cats, Our Forever Mews

Nowadays, we’re probably most familiar with the art of cat photography. Pictures and videos of our felines inundate the internet, with some getting their own Instagram profiles, complete with professional snaps. 

The practice of capturing your cat on film dates earlier than you might imagine. Jessie Tarbox Beals was the first published woman photojournalist in the United States, hired by numerous newspapers to cover the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (lugging 50 pounds of equipment around in ankle-length dresses).

She also loved cats. Photographs from the turn of the century show various tabbies posed humorously in her studio, one even tucked into a sickbed with medicine at the ready.

As the technology available to artists continues to evolve, we’ll likely see cats remaining in their role as fickle muse. VR kitten cuddles, anyone?