Artists
who have possessed the technical skill requisite to such delicate work
have rarely been willing to give to what they have regarded as
unimportant subjects the necessary study; and those who have been
willing to study cats seriously have possessed but seldom the skill
requisite to paint them well.
Thomas Janvier, whose judgment on such matters is unquestioned, declares
that not a dozen have succeeded in painting thoroughly good cat
portraits, portraits so true to nature as to satisfy--if they could
express their feelings in the premises--the cat subjects and their cat
friends. Only four painters, he says, ever painted cats habitually and
always well.
Two members of this small but highly distinguished company flourished
about a century ago in widely separated parts of the world, and without
either of them knowing that the other existed.
One was a Japanese artist, named Ho-Kou-Say, whose method of painting,
of course, was quite unlike that to which we are accustomed in this
western part of the world, but who had a wonderful faculty for making
his queer little cat figures seem intensely alive.
The other was a Swiss artist, named Gottfried Mind, whose cat pictures
are so perfect in their way that he came to be honorably known as "the
Cat Raphael."
The other two members of the cat quartet are the French artist, Monsieur
Louis Eugene Lambert, whose pictures are almost as well known in this
country as they are in France; and the Dutch artist, Madame Henriette
Ronner, whose delightful cat pictures are known even better, as she
catches the softer and sweeter graces of the cat more truly than
Lambert.
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