Cats in Art: Youths Playing With the Cat (Bloemaert)

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.  You really should check out and/or own both of these wonderful works, easily available on Amazon or eBay (and I have no financial interest).

The bride and I recently returned from a wonderful vacation in France where we were privileged to see both the Louvre and Orsay Museums.  Of the two, the Orsay was much better--less crowded, could get closer to the paintings, more cats.

Today is the last of 4 posts on the cat art of David III Ryckaert....except after I had this all queued up and ready to post this morning I took another quick look and realized that this was actually a painting by Abraham Bloemaert.  So you're only getting 3 Ryckaert works instead of four.

Image credit Wikimedia Commons, Abraham Bloemaert, Youths Playing With the Cat, ca 1620, 35" x 28", oil on canvas, held by Fondazione Musei Senesi, Sienna, Italy.

And the kitty close-up:

I cannot recall how I steered myself wrong on the provenance and painter, but in my web travels I ran across a site called Sad Cats in Art History--to which you really should hop on over and scope out (provided you do come back here!)--where the resident blogger comments with this gem:

 “See? He LOVES it when we pretend he’s a baby.”  Celebrated for his depiction of historical subjects, 17th-century painter-printmaker Abraham Bloemaert recorded in this painting (Youths Playing with the Cat) how two young Dutchmen learned to perform first aid on extremely short notice.

This cat is about to erupt.  I'm talking about a major detonation, and the poor kid holding the cat is smack dab in the epicenter of the impending blast, even though it's the dotard on the left who is doing the actual pulling of the poor feline's tail.

[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!]