My Very Own Halloween Cat

Pictured below is Ca Beere, our petite all black cat.  Black fur, black nose, black whiskers, and when she closes her yellow eyes she's pretty much an indistinguishable shadow.  Ca Beere is about the sweetest dispositioned cat we have ever had, always clamoring to be picked up or to sit on your lap.

Speaking of which, this morning she is shown on my lap, gathering her strength, for indeed, today is her day to shine.  She will be quite busy the rest of the day, I'm sure, performing her ceremonial Halloween functions.

Cats in Art: Greek Vase (unknown Greek artist)

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.   

After seveal several posts on the art of Chardin, I am diverting into some art that the bride and I just saw in Italy on a wonderful visit to the Amalfi Coast.

This urn (perhaps 2' or so tall) comes from the ancient Greek site at Paestum near Sorrento.  The Greeks were there some 2500 years ago, predating the Roman period.

The urn above just knocked my socks off, with the lion added as a purely aesthetic and decorative touch.  I keep thinking about the maker of this urn, who out of whimsey or art or frivolity decided that this urn needed a cat on it, lest it somehow be incomplete.

And then the kitty close-up:

This lion is perhaps 8" tall, and seems not so much interested in the urn's contents as it it in guarding said contents.   Perhaps from the snakes or horses found elsewhere on the urn?

[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!] 

Cats in Art: Still Life With Cat and Fish (Chardin)

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 is the third of several posts on the art of Chardin.

Image credit  Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Still Life With Cat and Fish, Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, 1728, oil on canvas, 25" x 31", held by Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain.

Very, very cool calico kitty over there on the left, totally intrigued by the plethora of fish.  As previous "owners" of a couple of calicos, the bride and I have a special place in our hearts for these tri-colored felines, whose genetic code for coloration renders all calico kitties necessarily female.

This girl is ALL business, ready to move on the free food displayed, right over there!  Again, Chardin gets it right with the facial expression of the cat, her eyes, her fur, her posture.  Obviously a cat "owner," from nearly 300 years ago and a continent away....


[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!]

Cats in Art: The Laundress (Chardin)

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 is the second of several posts on the art of Chardin.

Image credit Arthermitage website, The Laundress, Jean-Simeon Chardin, 1730, oil on canvas, 15" x 17", held by The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

And the kitty close-up:

From the Arthermitage website:

Painted in the 1730s, The Laundress is a masterpiece by Jean-Simeon Chardin, who took much pleasure in depicting scenes from the life of the ordinary people who inhabited the poor craftsmen's areas of Paris. In the room where a young woman works hard scrubbing clothes in the tub, everything seems to be suffused with a sense of quiet and calm, an impression created thanks to the combination of many elements in the painting: the simple, strict composition, the symmetrically arranged objects, the alternation of areas of light and colour. One of the most marvellous things in the painting is the female figure seen through the door, the space around her filled with steam. Although we cannot identify the source of the light, we can guess from which direction it falls. The painting has a very restrained colour scheme, the artist selecting each colour very deliberately and using it with great care to give a fuller sense of each object's reality and solidity.

Art aside, the composition of the scene intrigues me--especially I like the way Chardin has captured way cats like to be with people, but at the same time not exactly be with people...i.e., nearby and ready to interact.  Provided it's advantageous to the kitty.

[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!]

Cats in Art: The Ray (Chardin)

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. 

Image credit The Louvre, The Ray, Jean-Simeon Chardin, 1725, oil on canvas, 45" x 57", held by The Louvre, Paris, France.

And the kitty close-up:

Bugler tells us:

Chardin's early masterpiece is a painting in tow halves: on thee right are the kinds of humble kitchen utensil around which the artist constructed many still lives, and on the left is a tense drama played out between the kitten, making its way gingerly towards tow limp fish in the foreground, and the hideous ray or skate with an all-too-human face, grimacing menacingly in the background.

As for me, I found the kitten's face disturbing, mouth open, looking somewhat crazed (I like seafood too, but I hope I never approach it looking like this cat does!).

All in all, a dark and foreboding painting.

Zuffi also had this comment:

The secret and the magic of Chardin's paintings lie in their cold, sterile light, which seems to saturate objects, and in the intimate absorption that seems to endow them with a timeless existence.  The only living presence--and it is very much alive, with its bristling fur and demonic eyes--is the cat, who is more interested in the fish placed on the table than in the hug sea monster in the background.

[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!]

Cats in Art: Interior of a Townhouse (de Man)

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.  

Last week I put up a repeat post from the brush of Cornelis de Man, a Dutch painter from the 1600s.  After diligent searching I was only able to uncover one other example of a de Man with a cat:

Image credit The Athenaeum, Interior of a Townhouse, Cornelis de Man, late 1600s, oil on canvas, size unspecified, held in a private collection.


And the kitty close-up of the distasteful confrontation down at the lower center:

My guess about this domestic scene is that the dog-cat encounter is not especially remarkable, because of the four humans nearby, one is engaged with wood for the fireplace, a man and a woman are talking to one another, and it is only the last woman over at the table on the right who even seems to (barely) notice the animal dispute...making me think that these two critters were often after each other.

Regardless, this is a great example of ordinary Dutch life.  In fact, the sheer ordinariness of the scene is what arrests me so: chatter, work at the kitchen table, stoking the fire, and a couple of pets seemingly trash-talking each other.

As I often say, too bad that this painting is hanging in somebody's private collection rather than in a museum.  It would be great to stand in front of this work and see it in three dimensions rather than two, to see the brush strokes, the thickness of the paint applied, to look at how the eyes and the hands (and of course, the fur!) are painted....

[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!]