She not only infuses a wonderful degree of life into her little
figures, but reproduces the shades of expression, shifting and variable
as the sands of the sea, as no other artist of the brush has done.
Asleep or awake, her cats look exactly to the "felinarian" like cats
with whom he or she is familiar. Curiosity, drowsiness, indifference,
alertness, love, hate, anxiety, temper, innocence, cunning, fear,
confidence, mischief, earnestness, dignity, helplessness,--they are all
in Madame Ronner's cats' faces, just as we see them in our own cats.
Madame Ronner is the daughter of Josephus Augustus Knip, a landscape
painter of some celebrity sixty years ago, and from her father she
received her first art education. She is now over seventy years old, and
for nearly fifty years has made her home in Brussels. There, she and her
happy cats, a big black Newfoundland dog named Priam, with a pert
cockatoo named Coco, dwell together in a roomy house in its own grounds,
back a little from the Charleroi Road. Madame Ronner has a good son to
care for her, and she loves the animals, who are both her servants and
her friends. Every day she spends three good hours of the morning in her
studio, painting her delightful cat pictures with the energy of a young
artist and the expert precision which we know so well. She was sixteen
when she succeeded in painting a picture which was accepted and sold at
a public exhibition at Dusseldorf.
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