![]() ![]() Fini wears a sort of low-cut corset, and a long-haired black cat is held between her open legs in a visual pun that is not lost on the viewer.Īs anyone who has owned one knows, cats are promiscuous and unfaithful, roaming the streets at night in ways that women historically could not, and in Japanese art cats and courtesans sometimes come hand in hand. Dora Maar’s image is perhaps the most deliberately erotic. In a 1961 portrait by Martine Franck, her wild dark hair is an eccentric counterpoint to the white cat’s refined appearance, while in another image she is shown wearing an evening gown as she kneels to feed six cats in her kitchen. There are some fabulous photographs of Fini with her pets. Photograph: Heritage Images/Fine Art Images/Getty Images Leonor Fini, meanwhile, kept two dozen cats, so it’s no surprise that their fur sometimes ended up melded with the paint on her canvases.ĭemanding companion … Woman With Cat by Pierre Bonnard. ![]() Plus, it is easier to paint while caring for a cat than a dog: they do not require walking, though they can still get in the way, as a gorgeous photograph of the painter Lois Mailou Jones standing at an easel with a kitten on her shoulder shows. It’s no surprise that cats appear so frequently in paintings: artists tend to love them, maybe because they are so defiant and independent. They pop up in annunciations by Rubens, Barocci and Lotto, representing femininity, domesticity and sometimes the devil – or what the Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz calls the “feminine shadow”, the dark side to the Virgin Mary, the mother of God. So it’s no surprise that they have been so often paired together as a subject by everyone from Morisot to Picasso, Matisse to Kirchner, Kahlo to Freud. The old, old association between cats and fertility, and their status as mother-goddesses from the ancient Egyptian Bastet to the Greek Hecate, means that women and cats have been seen as interlinked for millennia. In antiquity, they graced ancient Egyptian tombs and the mosaics of Pompeii. ![]() Cats are promiscuous and unfaithful, roaming the streets at night in ways women historically could notĬats are almost as old a subject for visual art as art is itself – there are felines painted in the Lascaux cave. ![]()
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