Artnet News has a story online entitled Meow No! 7 Paintings by Artists Who Have Probably Never Seen a Cat:
Our feline friends may now be the toast of the internet and social media, but they have also long served as subjects and inspirations to artists all the way back to the Middle Ages. Renoir has captured the blissful languor of the cat, just as Picasso depicted its playful savagery and Chagall its kineticism. And that’s not mentioning Louis Wain, who enriched the genre with the sheer volume of his anthropomorphized cat paintings.
But sadly, not all artists get cats. In fact, some have turned out artworks that portray them less like our furry housemates and more inexplicably strange, even grotesque creatures. Cats are weird, but surely not this weird. Below, we bring you seven times artists got these purrballs wrong—so wrong.
The first work in the Artnet story is John Raphael Smith’s Miss Sukey and her Nursery:
A young woman shown three-quarters length seated to right, holding a swaddled cat on her lap and preparing to feed it with a spoon; a steaming bowl on the table to left; curtain in the background; before clock added on the wall behind and phial and other implements on the table. 1772
Hand-coloured mezzotintVia The Trustees of the British Museum
I’ve found that prints of the painting are available for purchase from a seller on Etsy, for those so inclined.