He, like most cat painters, kept
his cats constantly with him, knowing that only by persistent and never
tiring study could he ever hope to master their infinite variety. His
favorite mother cat kept closely at his side when he worked, or perhaps
in his lap; while her kittens ran over him as fearlessly as they played
with their mother's tail. When a terrible epidemic broke out among the
cats of Berne in 1809, he hid his Minette safely from the police, but he
never quite recovered from the horror of the massacre of the eight
hundred that had to be sacrificed for the general safety of the people.
He died in 1814, and in poverty, although a few years afterward his
pictures brought extravagant prices.
Burbank, the English painter, has done some good things in cat pictures.
The expression of the face and the peculiar light in the cat's eye made
up the realism of Burbank's pictures, which were reproductions of sleek
and handsome drawing-room pets, whose shining coats he brings out with
remarkable precision.
The ill-fated Swiss artist Cornelius Wisscher's marvellous tom-cat has
become typical.
Delacroix, the painter of tigers, was a man of highly nervous
temperament, but his cat sketches bring out too strongly the tigerish
element to be altogether successful.
Louis Eugene Lambert was a pupil of Delacroix. He was born in Paris,
September 25, 1825, and the chief event of his youth was, perhaps, the
great friendship which existed between him and Maurice Sands.
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