Cats in Art: A Cat Attacking Dead Game (Desportes)

From my continuing weekly Sunday series of cats in art.  Having moved on from Stefano Zuffi's marvelous work, The Cat in Art, I am now using some ideas from Caroline Bugler's equally impressive book, The Cat/3500 Years of the Cat in Art.  

This'll be the sixth  of several Alexandre-Francois Desportes paintings that will be featured here.

Image credit The Atheneum, A Cat Attacking Dead Game,
Alexandre-Francois Desportes, 1700s, oil on canvas, dimensions unspecified, held in a private collection.

And the kitty close-up:

OK, you've borne with me through a month and a half of mostly cats with dead stuff as imaged by Desportes.  Being tempted, as it were, to be bad kitties.  Mostly they failed (well, actually I guess they failed in every case, giving in to their natural hunting instincts).

But what I keep coming back to is just how marvelously Desportes captures these cats, and this bad calico is no exception....total focus, deadly intent.  Desportes manages to grab these behaviors while simultaneously capturing the physical details of fur, paws, face, and ears.  

As I often say, too bad that most of these Desportes paintings are hanging in somebody's private collection rather than in a museum.

[Gary note: With my Cats in Arts posts, I encourage you to scope out the art appreciation site Artsy (I have no financial interest in the site, I just like it), where you can explore many aspects of the world of art.  You'll certainly be entertained and enlightened!]