Loose Portrait of a Cat Looking Up

About this drawing

A cat sketch belongs to a tradition that stretches back centuries. Artists have always been drawn to these animals, perhaps because they are graceful, mysterious and completely unwilling to hold a pose. Some of the biggest names in art history have tried to capture them anyway.

Leonardo da Vinci filled a sheet with studies of cats in many positions, with a small dragon slipped in among them. It is now in Britain's Royal Collection, and it reveals how closely he observed the way a body moves. Centuries later in Japan, Utagawa Hiroshige made a beloved woodblock print of a cat on a windowsill, gazing out at the fields of Asakusa.

Cats were also part of the scene in nineteenth-century Paris. Édouard Manet placed a black cat at the foot of the bed in Olympia, a painting that caused an uproar. Théophile Steinlen turned a feline silhouette into a poster icon with his design for the Le Chat Noir cabaret. Later, the Japanese-born painter Tsuguharu Foujita included them in many of his self-portraits.

Part of the appeal is the challenge. A cat can change from a long, stretched-out line to a tight ball in a few seconds. That is why so many artists have used this subject to sharpen their powers of observation and to learn how to say a lot with just a few lines.

• cat
• art history
• sketch
• portrait