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Henriette Ronner

THE PAINTER OF

CAT LIFE AND CAT CHARACTER

by

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M. H. SPIELMANN,

Author of quot;The Life and Works of G. F. WATTS, R A,quot; Editor of the '•'■Magazine of Artquot; and sometime

Art-Editor of '■'■Black and White!'

A New and Popular Edition

Amsterdam, KIRBERGER amp; KESPER.

KUNSTHISTORISCH INSTITUUT DER RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT

PREFACE.

In the preface to the first Edition of this book the author set forth how it was published to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Madame Ronner's birth, and to introduce to the public the life-work of the overdiffident artist. Not twelve months have elapsed since them, yet the publishers have already been called upon to produce a popular and less elaborate edition of the work, so that all may enjoy what was originally intended chiefly for the collector and lover of luxurious volumes. The success of the work, has, indeed, advanced along with the appreciation of the artist by the great and official public. For within the past few months exhibitions of Madame Ronner's pictures and studies have charmed the picture-lovers both of Paris and London; and from them the State in France, and Royalty in England, have each enriched their collections of works of art. To the lovers alike of art and nature this artist's work appeals; and for them this new edition has been prepared.

London September 1892.

PREFACE

TO THE FIRST EDITION,

It is rare that an artist seeks an introduction to the public when his allotted span of life is passed and gone; when for wellnigh three-score years and ten his hand has grasped the brush, and wields it still with unfailing power and unremitting industry. Yet so it is with Madame Henriette Ronner, than whom perhaps no other foreign artist with so much talent, and indeed genius, is less known in England. And her friends, feeling that the modesty and retirement of her disposition, which have hitherto kept her so much from the world, were an injustice at once to herself and to her art, have persuaded her to permit the celebration of her seventieth completed year by the simultaneous publication in England, France, and Holland, of an illustrated essay, written in each case by a different hand.

To me has been accorded the grateful task of writing the text for the English edition; and I have gladly seized the opportunity of setting on record the delightful achievements, and of saying something ol the patient and heroic life, of the gentle lady with whose work the English public was enabled for the first time last year to become acquainted.

To the Publishers of the Magazine of Art I am indebted for their courteous permission to incorporate into this essay the paper on quot;A Great Painter of Cats,quot; which in 1890 I wrote for that publication.

London November 1891.

IIENRIETTK RONNER

PAINTER OF

CAT LIFE AND CAT CHARACTER.

Th

world as impressive as the cattle-world of Potter, and as beautiful and touching as the stag and dog-worlds of Landseer; and she has peopled it with a race remarkable above all for beauty and grace, for playfulness and cunning, and for intelligence far beyond what most people have any knowledge of.

No one who has taken the trouble to study the feline race has been able to resist the fascinating qualities which are eradicably embedded in its nature; while its prettiness and everchanging expression, its beauty of contours and texture, and its constant variation of light and shade, offer unusual opportunities to the sympathetic artist who has the courage to undertake the portrayal of its charms. But the difficulties attending the task are curiously great, and all-unsuspected by those who have never attempted it. Madame Ronner is one of the very, very few who have tried and succeeded; indeed, the number of cat-painters who have triumphed in their adopted line do not exceed a half-a-dozen, or thereabouts.

But not only for the artistic possibilities which she offers has the cat been a favourite with the more tender-hearted among the lovers of animals. For her moral qualities, strongly defined and irrepressible, she has long been esteemed by the intellectual, and by none more than by authors of distinction; while for her calm and unalterable independence, and her dignified sufferance, so to speak, of the human race, she has always had her friends and champions where those qualities are appreciated.

quot;Vivcnt Jes chats!quot; wrote Mme. de Custine in one of her delightful letters to Buffon, (who like Ferdinand, was a confirmed cat-hater) wherein with no little scorn she stigmatized the dog as a mere quot;fidelity machine.quot; quot;Civilisation has not yet become a second nature for them. They are more unsophisticated than the dog — more graceful, more independent, freer, and more natural. When by chance they love their tyrant, Man, it is not as a degraded slave, like your craven dogs, that lick the hand that smites them for the reason that they have not the spirit to be inconstant! In cats attachment is the result of selection.

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but in dogs of stupidity. Your canine idiots are the product of society, and are appreciated by man for the same reason as double flowers are valued: they are the result of cultivation, and, to a certain extent, of his own creation. I fear my sentiments may annoy you; if they do, hate me for it, but tell me so often.quot;

None but a Frenchwoman of originality and esprit, of the temper and fibre of Mme. de Sévigné, would venture to give frank utterance to such sentiments as these. To love a cat, it has been truly said, one must be in complete harmony with its nature, and in a manner partake of it; and to admire it just for its lack of affection is assuredly a palpable, a most palpable, confession. The Portuguese have a saying: Bum amigo cs el gat o, sino que rase una (quot;The cat is certainly friendly, but it scratchesquot;); and it may, I think, be taken that the fair writer was more • completely in sympathy with the animal of her predilection than she herself had any suspicion of. In the face of this eighteenth-century instance, are we not reminded that Simonides set it down in his quot;Satire on Womenquot; — the earliest satire extant, by the way — that froward women were made from cats, just as the most virtuous and the best were developed from bees? To most people the cat has recommended, if not exactly endeared, herself by the implacable guerilla warfare she — (why always quot;shequot; ?) — prosecutes against the common rodent: that is her claim upon the suffrages of society. The Patagonians, Darwin tells us, love the cat for her flavour. The Gauchos cannot agree to relish the flesh of lion, as it tastes like veal — as insipid, the cannibals say, as the flesh of man. On the subject of cat, however, our Patagonian friends are unanimous: she is at once succulent and nutritious. But to consider her from the esthetic point of view, and to be content to see in her not only a sitter of certain promise, but the reflection of much that is most delightful and most admirable in nature, requires a temperament of a rare kind, and makes an enormous demand upon the artistic gifts of the painter.

Truth to tell, there are few things animate or inanimate so difficult to paint in the whole range of art as a cat or a kitten; and the reason is not far to seek.

The proverbial chameleon is not more changeable in point oi colour than the cat in respect to its contour, its expression, and its markings, which vary with every movement and with every thought of the fickle-minded beast. But as it is the worst of models for the easy-going artist, so is it the most fascinating: the one, probably, that has defied more deft and famous pencils than all the other domestic fauna of Europe put together. To the horse, the cow, the stag, the sheep, and the dog, eminent artists have devoted their attention and their talents times out of number; but how many have ventured on Shylock's quot;harmless, necessary cat,quot; and succeeded in portraying her form and feature true in life and spirit ? Mme. Rosa Bonheur shrinks from the contest. Nay, she has painted even the face of man oftener than the cat's, and both you may count on tlie fingers of your hands; while the principal animal-painters of all times have elected to avoid a particular branch of art which exacts such exceptional keenness and sensitiveness of observation, such swiftness and decision of touch, and such an inexhaustible stock of patience. From the days of Nicias, who was the first to paint a dog, three centuries and more before the Christian era, down to those of Mr. Briton Kiviere, it has ever been the same. Troyon and Mr. Peter Graham, Herring and Mme. Rosa Bonheur, George Morland and Van Marcke, James Ward and Mr. Sidney Cooper, Fyt, Snyders, Potter, Mr. John Swan, masters ancient and modern — all who come uppermost to the mind — have almost without exception kept to their cattle and their pigs, their horses and boars, panthers and lions, dogs, and sheep. Breughel and Teniers, it is true, painted their famous grotesque quot;Cat Concerts,quot; the former more successfully than the latter; but neither very happily from the point of view of either accuracy of form or insight into character — nay, they are not to be compared with Giulio Romano's cat in the Naples Museum nor with the ill-fated Cornelius Visscher's admirable print (of which only two copies are now known to exist.) It should be remembered that as a rule cats need not, like dogs, be shown in action; and they are perhaps the more difficult to paint on that account. Moreover, they lend an air

of repose and domesticity, for the most part, to the scene into which they are introduced, and they are therefore only on occasion available or desirable for the purposes of art. There can nevertheless be no doubt, as I have said, that painters — even the greatest of them — have hesitated to put their pencils to the test of cat-painting. I remember to have seen in the Lichtenstein Gallery a picture by Jan van Oosten purporting to represent the Garden of Eden, in

which all the animals are assembled, presumably for the ceremony ol nomenclature and classification. Adam and Eve arc there, too; but they, like ourselves, look in vain for the cat — the sole absentee among the more familiar beasts, all of which on the whole are excellently well painted. Again, Castiglione's elaborate animal-picture in the Louvre is a veritable picture-catalogue oi the beasts of the field, the stable,- the farm, and the house; but no cat is in view: she is absolutely ignored, or, what is more likelv, avoided.

On the other hand, some pictures of the sort — even those with Biblical subjects — do make an attempt to deal honestly and pleasantly by the cat. I have in my mind two other pictures of Paradise in which the cat takes an honourable, nay, a foremost place. The first is that by Jan Breughel in the Louvre, called quot;Paradise Lost,quot; in which, while our first parents are being driven out beyond, the cat lies stretched in full and sleepy enjoyment. She is well-drawn, but painted on too small a scale to permit of the introduction ot expression. The second picture is in the Academy of Art in Vienna. Here, in Franz Floris's quot;Garden of Eden,quot; the cat is lying stretched in the place of honour between the feet of Adam and Eve, comfortably spread out; and we cannot help asking ourselves if some covert meaning is not contained by this unusual compliment. This marked introduction of the cat into pictures with religious and Biblical subjects, is somewhat remarkable, and constitutes a matter difficult of explanation. In Lebrun's quot;Sleep of the Infant Jesusquot; in the Louvre — an unsophiscated sort ol version of the scene — the slumbering cat cosily ensconced beneath the elevated stove, lends quietness and domestic repose to the work even though its expression is bad. It is a pictorial accessory of value to the picture, even though its presence cannot be historically justified. But in that famous altarpiece by Barocci in the National Gallery, known as quot;La Madonna del Gatto,quot; the cat is the centre ot interest. Obviously borrowing the idea from Murillo's Holy Family quot;del Pajaritoquot; in Madrid, the artist shows the infant St. John holding above his head a struggling bird, terrified at the cat which rises on her hind legs towards it, while the rest of the group look on with amused interest. This picture is supposed to be a scherzo, or quot;playfulquot; work, without inner meaning; but may it not be intended to represent a forecast of the Great Catastrophe, or, at the least, an act ot kindly protection on the part of St. John ? If so, the cat here becomes — with sad injustice — the type and personification of cruelty, just as she is in Mr. Holman Hunt's well-known picture of quot;The Awakening Conscience.quot;

Where the great masters have not shirked the painting of a cat, they have

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usually failed most egregiously. Although, as I show further ou, the cat was, in comparison with other domestic animals, a late-comer and not altogether a welcome one in Europe, she was by no means an unfamiliar object to the eyes of the painters. True, in the vast majority of interiors the cat does not appear, especially in pictures by the Dutch and Flemish masters, where more than elsewhere we should expect to find her. But, on the other hand, in a few pictures as in some by Metzu and Maes, among others, she figures as a domestic fixture, as one who has long since ceased to be an intruder, or even a colonist; but has manifestly become a native, and is duly recognized as such. She occupies at times the domestic hearth, which far oftener appears to be the birthright of hunting and pet-dogs; but when she is introduced into these instructive pictures of the life of two and three centuries ago, she and her kind are usually represented as the heati possidenies of the cosiest corners and the happiest hunting-grounds.

Yet, whatever the cause, and how good soever the excuse and the explanation, whenever the cat is painted she is, as I have said, an almost invariable discredit to her creator and a libel upon herself. To take, for example, the work of that superb colourist and arch-perpetrator of anachronisms — Paul Veronese. Look in his masterpiece, quot;The Marriage at Canaquot; in the Louvre, and say what a naturalist would think of the cat that lies on her back and scratches at the vase. Her quot;lines,quot; perhaps, assist the general composition; but she is fearfully and wonderfully made, quot;unconventionalquot; to a degree at once startling and distressing to the lover or the student of the cat. Again, in Bloot's quot;Kitchen Interior,quot; in the Lichtenstein Gallery there is a sleek and well-fed cat in the foreground eating a stolen fish, the other occupants of the room being in the back-ground. The cat, therefore, is the centre of interest in the picture, which for exquisiteness of finish, for beauty of colour and drawing, and for the transparency of the shadows, and in fact, the general excellence of the composition, would be worthy of a greater artist than he who produced it. Nevertheless, the cat, although well-studied in expression and admirable in attitude, is wholly and hopelessly out of propor-

tion — unless, indeed, she belong to a species unknown at the present day — and her black-and-white fur is more like marble than hair. It is well-nigh inexplicable that a painter with such unusual power of brush and imitative ability should fail when he comes to represent a cat; yet the curious difficulty which has already been referred to, together with the conventional mode of regarding the cat in art, which existed from the earliest times, is in all probability the cause of the phenomenon. Nor is so mighty a master as Rembrandt free from the charge of perfunctoriness in the observation of feline form and character. In the Salon Carre, which is to the Louvre what the Tribuna is to the Uffizii at Florence — the Sanclum Sanclorum of all that is most admirable and perfect in the nation's art-

possessions — is a little quot;Carpenter's Shop:quot; a gem so exquisite in the painting of the light, so line in feeling and in keeping, and so perfect as a whole, that it proclaims itself a chef d'oeuvre alike to the uneducated and to the master in art. Yet, dozing on a chair, comfortably installed beside the

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fire, is a catsimply Mephis-tophelian in expression, and impossible in character. We know how Van

Rijn was often accustomed to paint dc chic — that is to say, without models, and quot;out of his own headquot; — and we do not look to him for appreciation of commonplace surface-beauty. Yet for a man who had observed and painted the flood and play of light as none observed and painted it before or since, this oversight

of nature is strange, even though it appears in one of the most superb works that have issued from his brush.

Where such a master is found wanting, lesser men may be expected to go wrong; curiously enough, this strange carelessness in respect to cat-life has prevailed in all schools. Horses and dogs have now and again been misrepresented and libelled in art, conventionalized by the indifferent or the thoughtless, and sanctioned and approved for a long period by fashion. But there have always been times when painters have reproduced them correctly and with spirit; indeed, the periods of truthful representation have often exceeded those of falseness of drawing and character. The cat, however, has always been unfortunate in her painters, but seldom more so than in Fragonard's quot;Music Lesson,quot; which hangs not far from Rembrandt's picture in the Louvre. Anything more absurd than the cat therein it is impossible to imagine. The animal represented resembles jugged hare more than any other object in or out of nature — so comically unlike what she is intended to be, that the cat making friends with a dog in Frans Mieris's quot;Flemish Familyquot;, which hangs in an adjoining room, is life itself, although not to be compared for a moment for any quality, except for fine, miniature-like brush-work, with one of Madame Ronner's studies. There is a beautiful tortoise-shell cat in Willem Mieris's celebrated quot;Poultry Shopquot; (sometimes called Lc Chat) in our National Gallery that is a splendid realization of the animal, and only fails through the artist's finnicking attempt to paint every hair. And fail it does, as a work of fine art. And so in the whole weary little round — for there are not so very many of them after all — the cats are obviously creatures unknown, and perhaps considered not worth knowing, to the painter; and in proportion as they are disdained by the artist are they unacceptable to the beholder.

Landseer is perhaps the only English animal-painter of eminence who has not left Grimalkin severely alone, but the couple of cat-pictures he painted quot;The Cat Disturbed,quot; in 1819, and quot;The Cat's Paw,quot; in 1824 — were not entirely satisfactory in his eyes, so that he henceforward eschewed all dealings with the

Beloved of Pasht. For as it was with the ancient masters, so it has been and still is with the modern. Take a typical gallery — say the Luxembourg — as an example. Here at least you would expect that the cat, in her daintier and more peaceful aspects, would meet with due recognition; for who are more capable than the French of appreciating and seizing the finer qualities of supple and playful grace of the cat, and who possess in an equal degree the deftness of brush and perfection of technique necessary for the rendering of her soft and lithesome form ? And, yet, how many canvases do you suppose out of all the four hundred and fifty works contain a specimen of the cat-tribe? Only three; and in two of these the cat is but the merest accessory. In Chaplin's idealistic quot;Portrait of a Young Girlquot; —- which, through the efforts of the print-dealers, is one of the most hackneyed pictures of the day — a cat is painted full-face and asleep. Yet it requires almost an effort of faith to accept it for a living cat; and indeed it would appear as if the painter had purposely endowed it with a certain satanic expression for the purpose of heightening the ethereal, yet distinctly feline beautv of the luxurious girl. It is, indeed, no better than the cat similarly

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fondled in Sir Joshua Reynolds' celebrated picture, quot;Felinaquot; — an animal, the species of which is determined rather by the title of the picture than by the representation itself. The strange black cat, with glowing yellow eyes, in the quot;Olympiaquot; of Manet, is a creature far more worthy of respect, purposely departing from nature, though but slightly, for the purpose of adding weirdness to this witches' familiar. As she stands, horrible in her ugliness, back arched, tail erect, she is the kind that vivifies, and almost justifies, the superstitions to which I refer on a later page. Character is here — true feline character; but there is no attempt at rendering realistically the texture of the fur, such as constitutes one of the chief beauties of the canvases of Madame Ronner. The third work is one of the few fine cat-pictures, considered as such, in any public gallery of the world. This is the quot;Family of Cats,quot; by Monsieur Lambert, a work in Madame Ronner's own manner, conceived after her own heart, composed and painted in her own style.

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The mother sits upon the table, watching the gambols of her four mischievous kittens, — a group similar enough to several ol the pictures in this book, yet entirely, I am assured, without influence on any of them. It is instructive enough, and not a little tempting, to compare the two great rivals in the art by means of this picture; and in doing so we find, that although Monsieur Lambert herein

surpasses Madame Ronner in smoothness and refinement of touch — though I do not mention this necessarily as a merit — the lady as undeniably excels Monsieur in the life she infuses into her little figures; and while, on the other hand, her compositions are perhaps more obvious or deliberate in arrangement to the practised eye, her cats and kittens are less manifestly posed for their portraits. So much may be gathered from a careful comparison of the pictures ol these two eminent painters and in judging between them 1 have done so with strict impartiality.

11

It would be easy to trace out the other examples of cat-painting in our own galleries, but no good purpose would be served by multiplying them, for those to which I have referred are fair types of the whole; and no further record of indifference, incompetence, or carelessness on part of the painter will explain away the fact that the cat is to a certain extent outside the pale of artistic representation and was for long generations altogether unknown to art and poetry alike. This is indeed the more extraordinary when we reflect that in earlier days the cat had been held sacred in the eyes of many peoples, and has in many ages occupied a position of honourable trust and admitted importance on the hearth of civilised man.

It may be that the superstitions that have ever dogged the unfortunate tribe of the cat, and made of her for centuries a persistently persecuted beast, tended to detract from her popularity with the painters and their patrons ol a more credulous age. The symbol of liberty in Rome — blazoned courant or passanl on the shields of mighty warriors — by reason of her independence and dogged refusal to be taught, or to conform to rules; and the personification ol the moon in Egypt, by the contraction of her pupils by day and their dilatation by night, she became an object of suspicion, dread, and hatred to later generations. Her spirit of independence, indeed, is the most distinctive characteristic of her nature. As Madame de Custine rightly said, the cats' great difference from, and according to her sentiments, superiority to the dog, lies in her calm insistence on selection which invariably accompanies her apparent docility. To the dog, proprietorship is mastership; he knows his home, and he recognizes without question the man who has paid for, feeds, and, on occasion, kicks him with all the easy familiarity of ownership. He follows that man undoubting and unnoticed, grateful for a word, even thankful for an oath. But the cat is a creature of a very different stamp. She will not even stoop to conquer, nor be tempted out of her nature by offers of reward. She absolutely declines instruction; nay, even persuasion is lost upon her for any permanent effect it may be designed to have. We are told that upon

certain mortuary statues of Egyptian ladies the word quot;Techauquot; is to be found; that is to say that these fair matrons have been dignified with the name of quot;Catquot; to signify the untamableness of their spirit and their unconquerable resistance to coercion — just as we might engrave the title ol quot;Lionquot; on the sarcophagus of a national hero. You may be the legal possessor of a cat, but you cannot govern her affections. You can regulate neither her movements nor her hours of coming-in or going out, as you can in the case of a dog; nor even make her accept your house as her home if she is not so minded, although she is above all things a home-loving animal. She may perchance be pleased to quot;recognizequot; a member of your family as her particular crony, but that only for such time as pleases her, though you lavish your favours and make her advances of courtesy and affection such as any beast of prudence and self-esteem might be proud to welcome, and would turn the head and spoil the character of a dog. Like a child, the cat demands not only that sympathy should be there, but that it should be reciprocated, and without sentiment she will be beholden to you tor nothing save the bare necessaries of life. This immutability, or incorrigibility, of cat character is well typified in the fable of the beautiful cat which, in answer to the fervent prayer of her owner, was changed by the pitying gods into a woman, and yet, being married to her master, could not resist during the hour of dinner from springing from the table on to a mouse that had unwarily crossed the floor, and greedily devouring it before his eyes. It mattered not to the Greeks that the cat is faithful to the master or mistress of her choice during good behaviour; no place had she found in their literature till the time of its decadence. No author or poet was there to sing her praises and extol her virtues; for there were no prototypes of Puss-in-Boots and the saviour of Dick Whittington, to impress the minds of rising generations. Not even her cleanliness, unmatched in the whole animal world, could recommend her to the suffrages of either Greek or Roman, and, as Blainville has pointed out, her form is as foreign to the domestic art of those nations as it is to their literature.

13

And so in later times, when the feudal system reigned, the dog and the horse practically monopolised human affections for the animal world. With these companions of man in battle and the chase, as in the courtyard and the hall, the stay-at-home and delicately-constituted cat could not hope, even if she desired, to vie in his esteem. Her sedentary, and peace and comfort-loving ways did not harmonise with the roving habits of the period, and, as Monsieur Henri Havard, the eminent French art-critic and writer, has pointed out, the clash and noise of iron and of the light offended the dainty organization of her ears, and the disturbing proccss of moving, then as now, went to her nerves. Where a cat has been content to take up her residence, there she desires to remain for good, whether the household to which she nominally belongs, goes or stays. It is the house, in most cases which she loves, and not the household; the furniture on which she fixes her young affections, and not those who make use of it. And so it came about that she declined to have anything to do with Europe for many a generation, and when, towards the beginning of the ninth century, according to the researches of Sir John Lubbock, she ventured so far as to appear among the barbarous nations of the West, she cut a figure poor indeed in comparison with her former high estate. How had the mighty fallen! A deity in the land of the Pharaohs from the time she was imported from Persia, she was worshipped while she lived in Egyptian clover; and when she died, her mummy was reverently placed in the Temple of Bubastis, as Diana was elsewhere less euphoniously termed. Thence she travelled, via Cyprus, to our shores of Cornwall, but, it must be confessed, with no slight loss of dignity by the way. True, she arrived with the reputation of a doughty huntress of vermin and a deft chaser of snakes; true, too, that the fabulists had pointed morals out of her, and the most imaginative of the romancists had set her a worthy place in the immortal pages of the quot;Arabian Nights.quot; But her honour had been tarnished; she was no longer the ^Elurus of earlier days. Satan had chosen her form for his favourite Protean change. Hecate, too, as a matter of precaution, unhappily struck on the same idea, as Ovid tells

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us, Fek soror Phoebe latuit; so that she fell into disrepute. She lost character and caste slowly and surely, and step by step, till at length, the last resource of the metamorphic Djinns, she was reckoned the familiar of the witch and the companion of the unholy. Indeed, the full warmth of her affection, so rarely accorded by her to any, was itself the cause of ruin to many a poor old woman, who paid for the constancy of her cat by being pronounced in league with the devil, and discharged the customary debt by being condemned to the furnace. Those who have read Mr. Lecky's blood-stirring quot;History of Rationalism in Europequot; will remember how women were considered liable, at the baleful pleasure of a witch, to be changed into cats, and how for this supposed practise of lycanthropy many scores of poor creatures — feeble, old, eccentric, or otherwise nervous — were condemned in those terrible priest-ridden times, to perish at the stake. Little wonder then, that moved by these superstitions — superstitions and persecutions hallowed and encouraged by ministers oi religion, and as narrow-minded and fierce as any engendered by the Grand Inquisition itself —

the cat was fixed upon as a thing of darkness, and the maiming and killing of her as an act of grace.

To quote Monsieur Havard again,

quot;like those poor souls, they were tracked and condemned to the knife, and up to the middle of the sixteenth century it was thought a meritorious deed, as Monsieur Edelstand du Méril points out, to throw cats into the fire of St. John.quot; In many parts horrible cruelties were regularly practised on cats to make a religious holiday, and Metz, Hirson, and Ypres are recorded as recognized places for the infamous and hateful ceremony.

And in time in England — to which in due and natural course, all the vices and most of the virtues have filtered from the continent — the cat fared no better.

Her undeniable usefulness, her quiet dignity and amusing self-respect, the silence of her tread and exquisite suppleness of her form, her comfortable domesticity, and her absolute cleanliness of person and manners — these were virtues that were oi too negative a character to plead successtully against the ignorant and merciless cruelty of the age. It availed her nothing that by the Laws ol Howel — the great legislator of the Kymry — her price was maintained at a respectable figure, and the torment of her body was enacted a felony. The sailors had found in her a Mother Carey's chicken oi disreputable and evil import, which by the mere playing with an apron or toying with a gown could so foment a storm that would rend sail and snap mast, that she must of a surety be in hateful league with Davy Jones himself. And what indignities has she suffered! Sharing the honours of burial with kings and princes, and the divine right of adoration with the gods of the Egyptians themselves, she found no common or uncared for grave in those days of her exaltation — happy times which left her unspoiled, as her reverses have been powerless to sour her temper or to vulgarize her character. Worshipped by the people, exalted on high by her special priests and appointed virgins, she ended a life of godship with becoming dignity — her body embalmed by holy hands and her form encased in linen bands with all the rites and ceremonies due to her sacred race. Such she was when Pharaoh ruled. But now! By the sacrilegious hands of fellaheen, whose ancestors bowed down to them and worshipped them, the mummy-cats are shovelled from the resting-places where they have slept these thousands of silent years, and shipped to London in trading-vessels to the order of Cockney consignees, quot;f. o. b. Docks, London,quot; at so much a ton. And for what? Not that they may help, perchance, to glorify themselves on canvas by becoming quot;mummy-brown; quot;that is a purpose reserved for their masters who owned them, and who are ground down by our enterprising colourmen into a pigment, rich indeed though doubtful in its qualities of permanency; but that they may be broken up and scattered broadcast across our fields as manure — so that Hodge may gain a silver-plated cup at the next local agricultural show with a bloated

;nce mangel-wurzel. It is the irony of fate for the gods of one age to become the

city, refuse of the next, like quot;Imperial Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay.quot;

that ¹ To the dignified repose of the Egyptian, there succeeded, in a later day,

and the bustling energy of the Greek and Roman. And in course of time, the natural

1— lack of sympathy between the busy nations and the peace-loving cat became more

;able and more keenly accentuated; their relations grew in a measure strained; until,

)und ^at l^ast, this painful feeling became positive antipathy, and, once more, the weaker

the went to the wall. As usual, misfortune and defeat were followed by dislike and

that contempt. Personal feeling had probably not a little to do with this unfortunate

igue degree of unpopularity, for in many people a deep-seated dislike of the feline

ours race, root and branch, is a matter of temperament and constitution. We have all

gods heard how Henri III would swoon at the sight of a cat, and how the first Napo-

hose Icon — like our General Lord Roberts —was little less affected; to such a degree,

erses indeed, was this the case with the pcht Cap oral, that Mme. Junot is said to have

pped gained an important political advantage over him by the exercise of a little diplo-

, she matic tact in merely mentioning a cat at the critical moment in a certain discussion,

holy This occasional hatred of cats, as I have said, is certainly in most cases a matter

s due of temperament. It is a feeling far stronger than any dislike consequent on pride

^ious being hurt when the cat coolly repels our well-meant advances, her delicate nervous

hem, system responding quickly to lack of sympathy, or shocked and offended by some

these clumsy proceeding on our part. This sensitiveness we are apt to ascribe to ill-nature,

order or at the least to ill-humour, and, misappreciating the state of affairs, are led by

d for our own ignorance to blame the whole race. But Buffon, as a naturalist, must have

as by been above such petty feelings; he must have had a wider and higher sympathy for

wned the animal world. Yet we find him, like Ferdinand, an absolute, almost a supersti-

ncnt, tious, hater oi the cat. So, too, Ronsard, confesses to the sentiment when he writes:

^may quot;Homme ne vit qui tant halsse au monde

[odge Les chats que moi dune haine profonde,

oated J^c hrti⁵ leurs yeux, leur front et leur regard.quot;

17

Herein, however, we should be slow to blame the animal which unconsciously inspires such distressful feelings, and look to see if in our own defects is not the solution of the problem. As many have been who would turn sick at the sight of an orange-blossom or faint in presence of a rose, it may safely be concluded that to a disordered or ill-balanced nervous system, and not to any inherent viciousness of cat-nature, the otherwise inexplicable dislike is due. But this aversion can hardly be urged in these later days as a reason for the invariable banishment of the cat from the studio for all save utilitarian purposes.

The truth of the matter is, that for painting cat life and character peculiar qualities are necessary in the artist to bring him into line with the oddities of his model's temperament. As the late M. Champfleury — the cat's Macaulay — has said of it and its habits; quot;The lines are so delicate, the eyes are distinguished by such remarkable qualities, the movements are due to such sudden impulses, that to succeed in the portrayal of such a subject as this, one must be feline oneself.quot; That, doubtless, is the secret; and unless you are as quot;felinequot; in movement and manner as Rouvière, the actor who was so enamoured of the cat that he exercised his pencil solely in order to be able to delineate her and her offspring brood, you cannot hope to raise the Felts domestic us into the realm of art by brush, by pencil, or by chisel. Nor is this all. You must love them as Mahommed and Chesterfield loved them; be as fond of their company as Wolsey and Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert, who retained them even during their most impressive audiences; as Petrarch and Dr. Johnson and Canon Liddon and Ludovic Halevy, who wrote with them at their elbow; and Tasso and Gray, who celebrated them in verse; as sympathetic as Carlyle, whom Mrs. Allingham painted in the company of his beloved quot;Tibquot; in his garden at Chelsea, or as Whittington, the hero of our milk-and-water days; think of their wordly weal like the Sultan El Daher Beybars, who fed all feline comers, or quot;La Belle Stewart,quot; Duchess of Richmond, who, in the words of the poet, quot;endowed a collegequot; for her little friends; you must be as approbative of their independence of character, their unamenableness

THE TURBULENT FAMILY.

to education, their inconstancy, not to say indifference, and their general lack of principle, as Mme. de Custine aforesaid; and as appreciative of their daintiness and grace as Alfred de Musset. Then, and not till then, can you consider yourself sentimentally equipped for studying the art of cat-painting. As Mr. Ruskin has it, you must know quot;kitten-nature down to the most appalling depths thereof,quot; and be sensitive quot;to the finest gradations of kittenly meditation and motion.quot;

The representation of cats in art is, of course, not rare; but, as I have said, good representation is. Since the archaic bronzes and statues of Egypt, and the mural paintings of Thebes, cats have now and again been seen in prints and upon canvas. The visitor to the admirable Tudor Exhibition of 1890 will remember the pictures, so touching from the association, of the cat which is said to have fed Sir Henry Wyat with pigeons while he was imprisoned in the Tower. Was Joanna Baillie thinking of this incident when, in her ode to quot;The Kitten,quot; she wrote these ending lines ? —

quot;Even he, whose mind of gloomy bent,

In lonely tower or prison pent Reviews the coil of former days.

And loathes the world and all its ways.

Feels, as thou gambol'st round his seat.

His heart with pride less fiercely beat.

And smiles, a link in thee to find,

That joins him still to living kind.quot;

Yet, many great artists have tried, and most have failed. Géricault, Dclacroix, and Barye, all made the experiment, and they far oftener succeeded in producing diminutive tigers than cats; thus reminding us of the saying of Mery, anatomist and surgeon to Louis XIV, two centuries and a half ago: quot;Be assured of this, God created the cat that man might caress a tiger.quot;

Nevertheless although great artists have tried, and been only partially successful in this line, specialists of note have arrived at perfection, or very near it, by the

19

exercise of those qualities to which reference has here been made. Combining with technical skill and ability the power of piercing and probing the strange inscrutableness of the cat in her calmer moods, of differentiating individual characteristics, and recognizing and classing with well-nigh scientific accuracy the thousand and one humours, and motions, and expressions of cat-mind and body, as well in irresponsible and thoughtless youth as in sober age — in short, the capacity to appreciate ^ufelinenessquot; in all its many aspects of temper, age, and breed — a handful of artists have arisen to eminence and secured for themselves

a niche in the Temple of Diana. But whole-hearted devotion to the subject such as Henriette Ronner's is invariably the price which has been paid for the distinction. Who that has seen it will readily forget the cat carved in wood over the gate leading from the Mausoleum at Nikko — the Netnuri no neko, or, quot;Sleeping Cat (or Rat-killer) ?quot; That by itself will sustain the reputation of the artist Hidari Jin-go-ro. Japanese artists in black-and-white, too, have done much in this direction, especially Hokusai, and Caldecott, basing his method upon theirs, produced some sketches of cats quite marvellous in their truth to nature. But these efforts, including even the famous ''Prowling Catquot; in Bewick's quot;Tales for Youthquot;, are comparatively insignificant beside the brilliant work done by Gottfried Mind, the

20

Swiss, celebrated as the quot;Cat Raphaelquot; on the initiative of Mme. Vigée Lebrun, of the end ot the last century and the beginning of this; whose gentle nature never recovered the horror of a massacre of cats ordered at Basle, where he lived, in consequence of an outbreak of madness among them in 1807. His works are very Japanese in their style of execution, like the recent sketches of Mr. Arthur Tomson; but the facility with which character, humour, and expression have alike been seized, and the correctness of the drawing, are far beyond anything produced in this direction in the Land of the Rising Sun.

But even better than all these, for general truth to nature, are the wonders of Desportes, ot M. Monginot, the pencil drawings of Grandville, and even of the little-known Burbank; and more important still, the pictures of Eugene Lambert and of Mme. Ronner. For them cat-life has no mysteries; and the kitten, which, for the majority of us, is merely an animal that is quot;generally darting somewhere else, and stopping before it gets there,quot; is to them as comprehensible and logical a little creature as any that walked out of the ark.

Madame Henriette Ronner, the daughter of Joseph Knip — a painter of respectable ability was born at Amsterdam in May, 1821, and springing from a family of artists and, moreover, displaying more than ordinary taste and talent for drawing while still of very tender age, she was destined by her father for the artistic profession, to which her grandfather, her uncle, and her aunt all three belonged. With loving care he himself superintended her education, while with quite unusual severity he enlorced his principles. The drawings made by her at the age oi five years are still cherished by her family; and indeed they are not without interest for those who would trace the development of the artist's talent from its veiy commencement. I am bound to admit that these sketches — which comprise a considerable variety of subject, but deal mainly, be it noted, with men and animals do not display the extraordinary genius discernible in those of Sii Everett Millais, for example, or of Gustave Doré at a similar period. They

21

undoubtedly lack the force, the individuality, the inborn facility and skill which were characteristic of those quot;infant phenomena.quot; Nevertheless, as youthful efforts they are sufficiently remarkable, and in point of ability they may take equal rank with the early effusions of Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R.A., and Mr. H. Stacy Mark, R.A., which have more than once been exhibited in London. With these, indeed, they have much in common.

For six years the child was forever practising with her pencil, when, in 1832, the most terrible calamity that can befall an artist overtook Heer Knip, just at the time when he could appreciate the wonderful -— and considering her age — the masterful, strides of his pupil. He became blind.

Only those who are themselves artists, who have learned to educate and use their eyesight for the proper understanding of Nature and her works, who have come, in short, to observe with accuracy and gaze with intensity, can fully realize the awful and appalling character of such an affliction. To adopt the artistic profession presupposes an enjoyment of eyesight and its cultivation keener than that of most men; and the deprivation is all the harder to bear when the sufferer has come to know to what superb effect his eyes may be taught to see. For in the study of Nature and her beauties, familiarity breeds respect. He who has taught himself to discriminate between the subtlest lines and tones, to analyse the colours of sky and landscape, and to examine as a scientist the expression of the human face and the human form; and to differentiate between tone and line, texture and moisture, aye, between mist and gossamer; who can detect the faintest variations of character and yet revel in the full and satisfying glories of an autumn sunset — he alone is able to realize what blindness means to the painter. And yet it is a calamity to which artists are peculiarly liable. That constant use of the eyesight rendered necessary by study and by the application demanded of every devotee of art, throws unusual strain upon the optic nerves. To this effort three of the greatest woman-painters of all times have succumbed. The Queen of painters, Sophonisba Aguisciola — of whom Van Dyck foolishly declared

SURPRISE.

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that during his visit to Genoa he had learned more of his art from her than of all his other masters put together — passed the evening of her life in utter darkness. Rosalba Carriera, whose autograph portrait hangs close to Sophonisba's in the Ufhzii Gallery in Florence, and Diana Glauber, the victim of an accident, were companions in like misfortune. While still a young man Assissi, called by his contemporaries quot;II Ingegno,quot; suddenly lost his sight, after straining it in the execution of his frescoes in the Basilica of his native city. So, too, had Pietro della Francesca suffered some forty years before, when happily his best work was done. Shortly after, — in 1550 — Raphael's eminent pupil Garofalo was constrained to lay down his brush for ever when his one eye failed and he was plunged into blackness and the world of night. Lomazzo, the painter of Milan, comforted himself for this misfortune, by turning author and dictating a couple of admirable

treatises on architecture and painting; and Gerard Lairesse confessed to something akin to resignation so long as he could converse on his beloved art and while

away the time with music. Two members of our own Academy, Ozias Humphrey — that artist with a grievance — who returned from India to enjoy but for a time the beauties of his native land, and the more recently-deceased Richard Redgrave must be included in the melancholy list. What could be more pathetic than the latter's exclamation when the dread verdict of the doctor was pronounced? — quot;What a sentence for one whose greatest and almost only pleasure has been to see and to do! Already I am almost unable to read, already the landscape begins to be misty, and it must go into darkness — to darkness perhaps without relief by surgery, though the oculist is very hopeful in words; but if there is to be relief, summer is coming, and there will be no sunshine for me! Flowers and weeds will be indistinguishable. God of His goodness give me patience and cheerfulness!quot;

With a fortitude equal to that of the most philosophical and enthusiastic of his predecessors. Heer Knip, who had lost the sight of one eye five years before, accepted the sentence of fete, and, redoubling the care with which he fostered the genius of his child, he announced to her, on the I^st. April, 1832, his determination to make her begin forthwith her serious artistic education. She was then but ten years of age, and proud indeed of being sent to buy her own materials and at being installed in her blind father's studio. The system of her training was severe in the extreme — which, indeed, none of less robust constitution could have withstood, and to which none but a child of spirit and gentle devotion would have submitted. From sunrise to sunset the little Henriette was kept to her easel, save for a brief respite for meals and for a two hours' siesta at midday passed in complete darkness — lest she, too, he thought, might be overtaken with the affliction which had overwhelmed himself. But the day's work was cheerfully borne by the child; and her reward is known to the world. Gifted with qualities that would have made her eminent in the broader path of promiscuous subject-painting, she came to devote her whole attention to cat and dog and still-life, until she has conquered the position of the acknowledged and successful rival of Monsieur Lambert, as a specialist in his own line.

24

But the way was long and hard. The father's quot;systemquot; was diciplinarian rather than artistic. He declined on principle to allow his daughter the benefit of any artistic instruction, ever impressing upon her the advantage of independent work and direct study from nature, which, he rightly preached, constituted the only royal road to success. Whether this removal of all means of art-education by teaching and demonstration in the usual sense, was owing, as has been suggested, to a sort of nervous jealousy on part of the afflicted father or whether it was carefully predetermined by him for prudential reasons, it is impossible to say. The fact remains that he allowed his little daughter no guide but himself. No eyes saw her canvas but her own. No corrections, no demonstrations, no valuable comparisons were possible. Initial advice was all that he could give; he could neither profit by the pupil's mistakes to set her right, nor draw her attention to facts and beauties unseen by her unpractised eyes. His counsel was unquestionably good so far as it went, and his long daily talks — his sole enjoyment in the weary night of his later life — were based on sound common-sense, likely to strike root in the child's mind and in due course to bear good fruit. His constant exhortations that she should study nature, and nature alone, were varied by his warnings against seeing with eyes other than her own. He told her what to look for and how to look for it; how the artist must be ready to sacrifice everything for his art; what was, and what might be, the position of the artist in the world and in society, how that position was to be secured, and how maintained; and lastly, he tried to explain the inexpressible joy and constant delight of the artist as he sees his conception grow and take form under his hand, while how he forgets his sacrifices and his sufferings in placing, perchance, the divine touch upon the canvas that may immortalize him who put it there.

Such were the discourses which formed the sole education of Henriette Knip, and to which she listened day by day. Issuing from the lips of the poor blind man, they burned by that very cause with additional force into her impressionable young mind. Although she suffered from the severity of his quot;system,quot;

she felt the truth of her father's words and the rightness of his teaching; recognizing that his method of study, if exacting, was more likely to bring her to the highest excellence by developing her own powers and resources, than the cold system ordinarily adopted in our academies. The father's wish at this time was that his daughter should become a portrait-painter — always the most prudent course to adopt for those who have an income in view, or a livelihood to gain — perhaps even for a painter of history. But that was a dream, fortunately as it turned out, never to be realized. The strict regime prescribed was religiously followed, but as it happily involved much studying in the open air its rigour was sensibly tempered. Her orders were to confine her attention to the drawing and studying of the figure; but the circumstances of her training and the prolonged sojourns in the country rather favoured animal drawing, and more often the figure went by default.

The severity of the young girl's training now began to bear fruit. Her advance was rapid, and by the time she was sixteen years of age she first exhibited her work in public. It was a picture of a cat at a window gazing at a drone, and its ready sale was joyfully accepted as of happy augury. This stroke of early fortune occured at Dus-seldorf, and henceforward Fraulein Knip became a constant contributor to the exhibitions of Germany and Holland. By the time she was eighteen, such was her decision of character that she had

developed into a facile and rapid producer, her pictures — the sale of which brought her each day her daily bread — being composed and painted in the taste of the day: rustic market-scenes, interiors with figures and animals, as well

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as cows, horses, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, fowls, and the usual population of the farm-yard. Up to within four years of the death of her father, Henriette lived with him in various parts of Holland and elsewhere, sacrificing every available moment oi her life to her art, and her convenience and comfort to the exacting demands of her afflicted and strict, yet solicitous parent. Heer Knip, who loved to roam from town to town, had shifted his residence successively from Holland to Belgium, and from Italy to France. His last visit to Paris was from 1823 to 1827, and there his daughter passed her early years, until she was six, returning to it only alter half-a-century had passed away. Even after his blindness overtook him in 1832, his nomadic and independent character, always strong within him, was in no way changed, and he moved now to the Hague, and now to various spots in southern Brabant, with his daughter as the constant and devoted companion of his peregrinations.

It was at Berlicum, one oi the villages of this province, that her lather died in 1847. Thrown upon her own resources, she acted henceforth on her own unaided judgment, and cultivated her art more assiduously than ever. Her father's precepts were not forgotten; so true did she remain to them that not even the tender passion by which she was soon after assailed could wean her from her easel. She had adopted a profession like a man, and like a man, perhaps, she came to regard matrimony essentially as quot;an incident.quot; Love, the poet says —

quot;Love is of man's life a thing apart —

'T is woman's whole existence.quot;

In the village of Berlicum, where sometime before she had lost her father, Madame Ronner found a husband. Here she met Feico Ronner, like herself a native of Holland; and when, in 1850, their marriage was celebrated in Amsterdam, Love had to contend with Art, to the great advantage of herself, and, as it turned out, of her family.

She had been, as might be judged from this recital, greatly overworked. Moreover, her strength was taxed by family worries and anxieties, and a serious illness being the result but a few days after her marriage, she was peremptorily ordered by her doctor to seek rest and health in Switzerland. The first stage of her journey landed her in Brussels, and there she settled and has remained to this day. She made it her home; and such was the enthusiasm and it must be added, the necessity of the girl, that in spite of the calls made upon her by the duties of maternity and the superintendence of the household, her application to art was never relaxed. Her first few years of married life were years of struggle and difficult indeed to bear; unknown; without support, fortune, or resource, imposed upon and her work taken advantage of by a near relative, — a ne'er-do-well whose debts she chivalrously thought it incumbent upon her to pay; her husband delicate and sickly¹ and her family increasing; in these straits it was that she became the breadwinner. She rose regularly at five in the morning and diligently painted for the day's food, and many a time she knew not whether there would be aught for the night's supper. Almost Quixotic in her views of honesty — declining to accept assistance, sensitive beyond what there was any need for — Madame Ronner kept herself in a state of isolation from the world through her modesty

¹

It would be unjust to make no other mention of the name of Feico Ronner than that printed above. Born at Dokkum, Frise, in Holland, he passed three-and-thirty happy years with his wife, and it is not too much to say that without his loving help and his excellent business capacity, she, with all her talent, would probably not have succeeded in making her way. As is so often, but by no means invariably, the case with artists, Madame Ronner has always had a horror of business of every commercial kind, and has persistently declined to trouble herself with any considerations beyond those of her household and of her art. To her husband, as later on to her sons, were always left the administrative and financial departments of their little community. To this day, such is her dislike of and indifference to monetary affairs that she will not trouble herself about the prices fetched by her pictures. Her business and her love is in the painting, and not in the selling of them.

and wö// timidity, without a single friendly artist-hand being held out to help her. She earned for her pains the unjust charge of pride and superciliousness ; but within her own little circle she was known and appreciated, and that sufficed for her. And within a few months came her first reward in a public recognition of her hard, yet not unpleasant toil — she was elected member of the Society quot;Natura Artis Magistraquot; of Amsterdam.

When first Madame Ronner took up her residence in Brussels and for the fifteen years that followed, she made a speciality of painting the draught-dogs of the little carts of vegetables, milk, sand, and so forth to which — and not in that city alone — it was the custom to harness them. These pictures were invariably demanded of her, and an quot;atielagequot; was regarded as essentially a quot;Ronner subject.quot; Much as the artist chafed against the limitations thus imposed upon her, the subject afforded her the opportunity of producing one of her finest works. Her masterpiece in this line was exhibited in Brussels in i860. This canvas, measuring eight feet by six, represented an old sandseller weeping over the death of one of his dogs still harnessed to the cart; and, creating a strong impression upon both public and critic, it at once placed the fame of the painter far higher than it had been before. More than thirty years have passed since that picture was exhibited, but it is still spoken of with enthusiasm by those who saw it at the time and recall the sensation it aroused not only amongst artists but among the general public. The subject, indeed, was one well adapted to impress the people, before whose eyes the touching scene must often have been enacted, just as it had been before those of the painter herself; for at that time dogs were far oftener employed than now as beasts of draught. The faithful animal that has fallen in his master's service and turns his head to glance once more with loving and fast-dimming eyes at the poor old man sobbing by his side, is an incident at once natural and pathetic and, treated with legitimate feeling, could not do otherwise, if well painted than make a public success. But it did a great deal more than this. Being well composed, painted with a full and powerful brush, with reticence in point of colour,

and vigour in respect to drawing and touch; and being besides novel in subject, broadly handled and presented with absolute truth and without aflectation a rare quality in those days — it at once challenged the attention and respect of the whole artistic community and extorted from them some measure of the praise the public were so quick to bestow.

As a natural result of so striking an achievement, Madame Ronner, as I have said, became famous lor her attelcigcs, and commissions poured in upon her — perhaps the more numerously as she then refused, as she has done since, to sell the original work which had brought her such wide favour. Fortunately her would-be patrons were content to receive portraits of their dogs in place of the eternal draught-dog subjects, and in the result, as will later on be seen, the action of kings and princes, writers and poets, collectors and quot;juries,quot; combined to raise the artist to a height of fame for which but a few months previously she scarcely dared to hope. But as no society could draw the timid artist from her modest retreat into the saloons that courted her visit, so her brilliant artistic success could not bind her to the class of subjects which had so powerfully contributed to her new position in or near the front rank of the artists oi the day. The truth is, she had about this time first looked, with the keen eye of the artist, upon a young cat which had found its way into her house and had awakened a new curiosity and a new desire within her. Curiosity became observation, and observation, study. From that moment, her affections — so far as her models were concerned — underwent a radical, if a gradual change; her liking for the painting of dogs decreased, while that for cats, the new models of her choice, became a passion. Her vigorous execution, the bravura quality of her brush-work — that proof of the practised hand — lent themselves with extraordinary fitness to the new class of subjects she was about to undertake. And, above all, the painter was fascinated by the grace of her new models: a quality in which Belgian dogs, it must be admitted (I speak from observation) are woefully deficient. It is only during the last twenty years that Madame Ronner has practically devoted her

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whole energy to the painting of cats; but that in them she has found her true metier none who consider them carefully can doubt. The number of works she has produced in her difierent classes of subjects and her different periods is extremely

tion is the manner in which she attacks her canvas. She does not stay to draw her outlines and then proceed to fill them in; she adopts the higher method of regarding in the first instance the object to be painted — whether a kitten, a man, or a piece of still-life — purely as masses of light and shade, and not as forms whose contours are surrounded and defined by lines. This way of seeing is the result not only of admirable training and long practise; it is the offspring of a virile mind, of a decisiveness of character and largeness of view, rare indeed among women, and distinctive of but a small minority of those who have risen to eminence, whatever their special line might be. As a painter, Madame Ronner unites an entirely masculine method of handling and procedure with a feminine grace which is all her own; and equipped with such natural gifts she could hardly do otherwise than put her knowledge acquired by practise to the greatest advantage.

Having thus quot;blocked inquot; her principal masses without reference to lines, she afterwards elaborates her picture from the rapid studies, which, being made all hot, so to say, never fail to secure not only form and colour, but character and expression as well. The details are then added as the artist studies her sitters at her leisure; for only at leisure can she hope to seize the particular expression of which she may happen to be in want. The original studies are necessarily, and for the most part, painted from the animals when at rest, as may be seen in the illustrations with which this text is adorned. Look at them one by one, these cats and kittens; pass them slowly in review and recognize how truthfully, and with how much love, and with what infinite appreciation the painter has recorded their many attitudes and humours. Their quiet dignity as they repose superbly on their luxurious cushions, immersed in sober thought; the piquant look of innocent surprise in the larged-eyed kittens; their comical helplessness in doze and slumber — these have only been obtained by intimate knowledge grafted on to high artistic power. And just as Madame Ronner differentiates between expressions in cats and kittens, so is she careful to distinguish between age, and tribe and breed — Angora and Persian, tortoiseshell, black and humble tabby — with the

32

same facility, and with equal certainty. It is capacity such as this which has brought the artist to the position she now enjoys; and this capacity she attained, as I have said, quite early in her career.

After her first success at Amsterdam, Henriette Ronner gained in turn awards at all the exhibitions to which she contributed, in Holland, Belgium, France, Portugal, and America. Medals in all the three metals of currency have repeatedly been adjudged to her works after the amiable — though, to English notions, perhaps rather childish — custom of foreign art-juries. This monograph would not be complete were the list of them omitted.

In 1850 came the election as Member of Merit of the Society quot;Natura Artis Magistraquot; of Amsterdam. Seven years then elapsed without further official encouragement, and then, in 1857, followed the Silver Medal from the Hague. The next year Madame Ronner carried off the Bronze Medal at Dijon, and, in i860, the Vermeil (silver-gilt) Medal at Troyes. The year 1861 was marked by three important awards — the Silver Medal at Metz, the Gold Medal at the Hague, and the Great Gold Medal at Lyons. Before twelve months had elapsed another honour was gained by the artist — her election as Member of Merit of the quot;Academy of Painting and Drawingquot; of Rotterdam. The year 1864 brought her

the Bronze Medal from Nancv and the Silver Medal from Rouen, and these were

j ^y

followed a year later by the Gold Medal and Certificate of Honour at the Universal Exhibition of Oporto. The Silver Medal came from Havre in 1868 together with the Gold Medal from Amsterdam, eighteen years after the artist's first official recognition in her natal town. At the Universal Exhibition of Vienna in 1873 Madame Ronner was awarded the quot;Artistic Medal,quot; and in the following year she was presented with the quot;Unique Medal of Meritquot; by the King of Holland. A contribution to the Universal Exhibition of Philadelphia in 1876 was acknowledged by the award of the quot;Artistic Medal,quot; while the years 1879 and 1880 brought Gold Medals from Antwerp and Amsterdam respectively. The latter city again, in 1883, presented Madame Ronner with a Gold Medal for her exhibit at the

Colonial and International Exposition, and Edinburgh — which, besides Glasgow, is the only city in Great Britain in which the artist's work has till lately been known — adjudged her a Silver Medal at its Universal Exhibition in 1886. In 1887 these attentions were worthily crowned by the sfazettins: of Madame Ronner as

O O

a quot;Chevalier de l'Ordre de Leopoldquot; — a distinction rare indeed for a woman to receive at the hands of the King ol the Belgians,

and tantamount, it may be supposed, to the quot;Chain and Medal of Goldquot; conferred with so much pomp and ceremony by Popes,

Kings, and Dukes upon the favourite painters of the period of the Renaissance. And all the while the gentle artist has been practising without cessation, selling her works in Belgium and Holland, as well as in Paris and Edinburgh, as fast as she can paint them; and painting in such a way as to build up the fabric of fortune, and of solid and noble reputation.

At first her pictures — upon which she had usually worked, as I have said, for several hours before breakfast-time arrived — were sold at prices which in these days would be considered modest out of all conscience and justice. But her aim and claim to be a bread-winner so dignified her art in her youthful estimation, that though she thought little of price and money they stimulated her efforts and whetted her ambition. To-day when her years are numbered threescore and ten, although her work is not yet done and betrays none of the signs

=s Glasgow, lately been

Mquot;.

in Belgium Daint them; snd of solid

I, as I have prices which justice. But er youthful nnulated her «ered three-■of the signs

,

of age or of failing power, she is recognized as one of the very few pre-eminent animal painters of the day, and as a specialist one of the most admirable of all times. Her pictures are included in royal collections, and, what is of far higher import, in municipal galleries and museums. Some of these it may be uselul to enumerate.

The first distinguished quot;patronquot; of Madame Ronner's work was the King of Hanover, who in 1863 bought her quot;Dog and Pups.quot; In 1864 M. Jules Favre purchased quot;Across the Field,quot; a picture of a boy riding a donkey, painted in her early manner. In 1863, Don Fernando, the King of Portugal, and in the following-year other members of the Royal family, acquired five pictures of dogs, cats, and quot;at tel a ges.quot; The Emperor William L, the King of Prussia, bought her quot;Cat attacked by Dogsquot; — a favourite subject of the painter, which she never treated better than in the little picture in the collection of Dr. Russell Reynolds. * Again, her quot;One against Fourquot; — a cat resisting the onslaught of three dogs — was added to the Museum of Amsterdam in 1868. quot;A Good Hiding Placequot; — a cat taking refuge from her natural enemy — became the property of the Museum

* It is interesting to compare the representation of cat terror in this picture with similar ones by the great and acknowledged masters of art. In Landseer's quot;Cat Disturbed,quot; wherein puss is persecuted and her nerves upset at her meal-time by the noisy and threatening interruption of a couple of ill-bred terriers, the study is evidently from nature. Observation is here, and a vigorous and not altogether unsuccessful attempt to realize it. But in spite of the arched back, the stiffened tail, and the flattened ears, the animal is rather a diminutive tiger or a lynx, than a cat; the true felineness is missed, just as the character and texture of the fur is missed, — the latter a fault, it must be admitted, rarely committed by Landseer. In the painter's other, and far more celebrated, picture, quot;The Cat's Paw,quot; the fault is not noticeable. The expression of extreme terror is better translated on to canvas than in any of the illustrations in Darwin's quot;Expression of the Emotions;quot; that is to say, Landseer's genius gave just that touch of art to his subject which is required to make unaided nature more completely suggestive to our imagination. On the whole, this is the best cat-picture I know, apart from the works of M^mc Ronner, Monsieur Lambert, and, perhaps I may add. Monsieur Monginot; because with truth to nature are combined that excellence of execution, vigour of touch and breadth of handling, that together constitute fine art. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that Landseer chose to represent both his cats in violent action, and action, as we all know, is apt to cover a multitude of artistic sins. Doubtless Landseer might have become a great cat-painter had he chosen; but he did not choose, and he therefore leaves the two artists I have just named as master and mistress of the field. Another snarling cat of the terrified order is to be seen in Chardin's exquisite quot;Kitchen Interiorquot;' in the Louvre Museum. That this delightful master, this superb painter of domestic grace and of the broadly simple and homely, should have failed so completely over this ill-drawn and only partly studied cat, is another piece of contingent evidence in favour of our heroine. The cat, snarling at what I take to be a red mullet instead of eating it, is unnatural and incompletely realized, and is a strangely accentuated blot in an otherwise beautiful and masterly picture of still-life. Better than this is the cat in Tintoret's celebrated quot;Ledaquot; in the Norton collection, which starts back from a duck; and she is poor enough.

of the Hague in 1872; while in 1879 the Museum of Dordrecht bought a typical Ronner in quot;The Water-Colour Paintersquot; — a picture representing a whole family of cats at play on an artist's painting-table. In 1875 the Count and Countess of Flanders, and in the following year the King of the Belgians, bought or commissioned portraits of dogs: which animals are usually of a breed, it must be confessed, that would hardly pass muster with one of the fancy in this country. Finally, in 1890, one of Madame Ronner's fascinating studies of cats and kittens passed into the possession of the Duchess of Edinburgh; and in 1892 quot;Banjo and his Brotherquot; became the property of the Princess of Wales.

But the success of the artist has by no means spoiled the woman, nor rendered her less diffident or less reserved than she has ever been. Her true delight is in her home. For her the pleasures of society, in the more worldly sense, do not exist and have never been. She has sought and found her happiness in her studio, surrounded by her family circle and a few intimates, and watching and studying the large colony of her feline friends, their characters and characteristics, as they wander hither and thither without let or hindrance. Only when her models are under particular observation, or are actually sitting, are restrictions put upon their goings out and their comings in. Then they must accept the nevitable and take their place upon the soft cushions in the glass case constructed for the séance, or in any other position willed by the artist.

It must not be forgotten — and I must emphasize the fact — that Madame Ronner is not only a naturalist in art; she is really a fine painter. Although somewhat limited, according to our English notions of what constitutes a powerful colourist, her technique is at least as fine as Rosa Bonheur's — virile, vigorous, decisive, unfailing in its truth, and admirable in its result. I admit

o * ^

that the subjects are not so imposing or impressive as those of the better-known and more loudly-praised painter; the sleepy cat or playful kitten is but small game beside the magnificent proportions of a Royal lion; and the ugly breed of the Belgian hound or poodle compares unfavourably with the splendid

36

grace and nervous strength of a full-antlercd stag. But, subject apart, no painter who studies the works of both will deny that for technique, handling, and for what Ruskin expressively terms quot;masterfulness,quot; Madame Ronner's art yields little if at all to that of Madame Bonheur. Nay, even on the score of subject, the

cats of the former are no less dignified than the lions and stags of the latter; they are as subtly modelled, as well drawn, and as vigorously and skilfully painted. But, as I have said, their inferior place in the scale of fauna handicaps them sadly — and not unnaturally, perhaps — in the ordinary estimation. I would even compare quite the best of her work with the early canvases of Landseer. It is, perhaps, a

37

bold thing to set up the works of a living artist in frank comparison with those masterpieces of British art; for I hold that some of Landseer's early studies, of which I am thinking, are as fine in drawing and colour as those oi Paul Potter — a degree of excellence he rarely attained in his finished pictures, and soon lost the power of altogether. But the comparison is admissible, and I think defensible. A merit which may certainly be claimed for Madame Ronner over Sir Edwin is her invariable refusal to gain approval for, and interest in, her pictures on what may be called outside considerations. She never, like him, humanises her animals out of their true natures expressions in order to quot;make a storyquot; and enlist the sympathies of the thoughtless; nor does she claim attention by means of quaint and farcical, but unnatural actions, or depend for any portion of her final effects upon humorous titles, such as of late years seem inseparable from quot;successfulquot; animal-paintings. Cats and kittens lend themselves perhaps more than other animals to representation quot;in characterquot; arranged in human pose, decked out with human expression; but in the whole sum of Madame Ronner's work I have not met with a single canvas which takes any such flagrant liberty with the probabilities, or would outrage the sense of propriety of the most exacting of zoologists.

As I have been saying, it was seen at the remarkable exhibition of her pictures of cats, dogs, and poultry, which was held at the galleries of the Fine Art Society in London in the spring of 1890, that Madame Ronner's artistic accomplishment equalled her keenness of observation. Moreover her success in rendering even the most transient of feline emotions and expressions is as remarkable as her dexterity in the suggestion of texture, however difficult, and of form and movement, however complicated.

This complication of form and light is, perhaps, the crux of the whole difficulty of cat-painting. The animal herself, long and thin and delicate beneath her deceptive coat of fur, is a mass of soft muscle which completely changes its contours with every movement, however slight it may be. This, perhaps, would present no unusual difficulty to the skilful draughtsman were it not that the fur

38

MATERNAL BLISS.

ÜH^—I

now exaggerates, now minimises every motion, not only in the direction taken by the hairs of which it is composed, but in the complex action of the fall and

play of light upon them. Herein lies the mysterious problem which so few animal-painters have been able to solve — the difficulty which they have so seldom surmounted; but which, once mastered, gives distinction to the successful artist. In order to study the fur in all its aspects, its texture, its movement, and the play and variations of light, it has been Madame Ronner's practise for years to place her models in the cushioned cage with a glass front, already referred to; and to this careful method, as has been said, is due in no small measure her extraordinary power of reproducing with ease and rapidity the true character of fur, even when it is brushed in with apparent carelessness and dash. This achievement is hardly less remarkable than the realization of feline expression, whether in love or play; in vivacity, in mischief, or in rest; in heavy slumber, or in sleepy wakefulness. In all these moods Madame Ronner's little model is always on the alert, always intensely alive, and like Princess Ida's,

quot;Her gay-furred cat's a painted fantasy.quot;

She paints it in every phase and humour of all its nine lives, and, as George Withers would have said, with care enough to kill it. But her cats all belonc

⁰ O

now exaggerates, now minimises every motion, not only in the direction taken by the hairs of which it is composed, but in the complex action of the fall and

play of light upon them. Herein lies the mysterious problem which so few animal-painters have been able to solve —■ the difficulty which they have so seldom surmounted; but which, once mastered, gives distinction to the successful artist. In order to study the fur in all its aspects, its texture, its movement, and the play and variations of light, it has been Madame Ronner's practise for years to place her models in the cushioned cage with a glass front, already referred to; and to this careful method, as has been said, is due in no small measure her extraordinary power of reproducing with ease and rapidity the true character of fur, even when it is brushed in with apparent carelessness and dash. This achievement is hardly less remarkable than the realization of feline expression, whether in love or play; in vivacity, in mischief, or in rest; in heavy slumber, or in sleepy wakefulness. In all these moods Madame Ronner's little model is always on the alert, always intensely alive, and like Princess Ida's,

quot;Her gay-furred cat's a painted fantasy.quot;

She paints it in every phase and humour of all its nine lives, and, as George Withers would have said, with care enough to kill it. But her cats all belong

to the very aristocracy of their tribe — they are well-to-do, plump, silky, and lovingly cared-for. The lean and the mangey do not appeal to her as they would, presumably, have done to Courbot. quot;Covetousnessquot; — a cat watching a canary — like her prototype in quot;Pericles,quot; quot;with eyne of burning coalquot; — is a revelation of cat-character: the head turned and raised, the drooping tail, the half unsheathed claws, and the quivering body, are so lifelike that it seems a marvel that the bird does not struggle to fly right out of the picture. Then how true is the maternal care in the picture of quot;Education,quot; and how suggestive the incipient savagery of the kittens as they move forward towards the captive mouse. Again, how comically pathetic is the love sick quot;Djouma,quot; the handsome Persian cat, with tail as quot;monstrousquot; as Carey's in quot;The Dragon of Wantley!quot; And what could be more lazily inert than that heavy old black tom-cat lying luxuriously by the hearth? — reminding one, as it does, of Mrs Pipchin's old cat, little Paul Dombey's friend, which, coiling itself upon the fender, used to purr egotistically, quot;while the contracting pupils of his eyes looked like two notes of admirationor, as Oliver Goldsmith so characteristically put it, quot;narrow and small like the black in your nail.quot; Had Madame Ronner lived when the poet Gray suffered his celebrated bereavement by the tragic loss of Selima — who perished miserably in a bowl of gold-fish — surely she might have helped to console and comfort him with her picture which so exactly corresponds to his description of the departed —

quot;Demurest of the tabby kind:

Her coat that with the tortoise vies,

Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes.quot;

But perhaps it is, after all, in the delineation of kittens that we shall find Mme. Ronner to excel if we carefully analyse her work. The incomparable grace and playfulness and pretty mischievousness of the little animal when awake, that unconscious conviction betrayed in its every movement that the whole world was made for its amusement alone, and its bland and engaging innocence when asleep, are all consummately rendered. The cat quot;sedate and grave,quot; like Cowper's, —

40

in spite of the difficulties attendant on painting it in its more sober moments, or even when engaged on foraging expeditions or in the chase — is easier to

41

Then, onward stealing, fiercely spring Upon the futile, faithless thing.quot;

Or this: —

quot;The learned sage, whose thoughts explore The widest range of human lore,

Pausing, smiles with altered air To see thee climb his elbow chair.

Or, struggling on the mat below.

Hold warfare with his slippered toe.quot;

The illustrations to this book consist of reproductions of pictures and oi studies from life, the earliest of them executed not more than seventeen years ago, and the majority much more recently. Taking the pictures first, and those in order of date, I would draw first attention to that entitled quot;Chmnhcr Music.quot; This was painted in 1876, and belongs to Mile. Moons of Antwerp. Here, as in the majority — and, it should in fairness be added, the most popular — of Madame Ronner's subject-pictures, the merry mischievousness of the kitten, contrasted with the sedateness of the mother, is the dominant note of the composition. But the excellence of arrangement must not be lost sight of in the subject, nor the well-judged reticence of the background and the firmness of touch in the painting. The vigour of life is perhaps not so much insisted upon in this picture as in the rest; indeed, it would appear that the more recent the picture the more successful is the artist in the rendering of the exuberance of kitten-life. Five years later quot;Roiiml the Worldquot; was produced and was immediately secured by M. Jans-sens of Antwerp. Not less happy than the amusing scheme of the picture is the disposition of the accessories. At first sight they appear, maybe, a little too crowded; but a student of geography, even outside the British Museum, has certainly been known to surround himself with equal profuseness with books of reference — and after all the cats are the thing. The chief point of excellence, it seems to me, lies in the admirable pose and character of the mother, whose concern rises not exactly to anxiety, yet whose interest in her young ones' attempted feat is not entirely free from maternal solicitude. In 1881 — and

42

CHAMBER MUSIC.

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—«11 WêmsMêê

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Miilc f⁷ was painted, soon passing into the possession of Mr. F. J. Howard, of New Orleans. The pretty independence and romping irresponsibility of the kittens and the handsomeness of the mother-cat first strike the spectator; but not less admirable is the superior vigour of execution over that of the previously-named pictures, and the greater richness and strength of colour. To quot;Covclousncssquot; the work of the year 1885, I have already referred as one of the truest and most excellent of Madame Ronner's transcripts of cat-lifc. Moreover, this partakes at least so much of the character of a frank life-study as of a quietly composed and thought-out picture. quot;The Turhuknt Family,quot; painted in 1888, is one of the works exhibited in London, Glasgow, and elsewhere in England, and must be considered — from its size at least — among the artist's most important efforts. The kittens are more mischievous, more delightfully wild than ever — perhaps with tenderer age — and, in consequence, the mother's anxiety amounts to alarm. The cage is overturned and broken, the bird eaten or flown; but the old cat's attention is riveted on the gymnastic efforts of her favourite to extricate itself

from its temporarily selected prison. And with perfect truth to nature each kitten's interest is centred in its own and not its brothers' doings. The work is distinguished

O O

by that freedom of handling to which I have more than once referred and which

constitutes one of the chief charms of the artist's painting. In the same year as this picture was painted quot;Surprisequot; — a little work, executed from life, representing the perplexed curiosity of a kitten at the first sight of a bluebottle-fly; but the title applies with equal truth, but in a more general way, to the more prominent little creature in the foreground. I would take this as an example of Madame Ronner's acknowledged ability in the painting of fur, without high finish, but with absolute truth. A slight examination will suffice to show with what consummate ease and economy of means not only the texture and the colour of the fur, but also the underlying anatomy, have been realized with a comparatively few rapid touches. To 1889 belongs quot;The Clockmahers,quot; a picture which is the property of Mrs. Lindemann, of Sidmouth. This family of young Persians, aristocratic, round-eyed, vivacious, and playful as the rest, repeat, if not exactly the occupations, the alluring love of mischief of the average healthy kitten; while to the ordinary self-control and dignity characteristic of the cat, the mother here seems to add a superb sense of her racial superiority. quot;Sans Sonet' is a still later work; it was painted in 1890 and belongs to M. Charles Delagrave, the publisher of Paris. The happy freedom from worldly care indicated by the title, could not be better rendered: but perhaps the picture is more important as presenting for the first time, in the canvases we have been examining, a kitten not only in sweet thought and in repose, but half-slumbering or asleep. On the face of this sleeping beauty is seen that expression so rarely conveyed to canvas by the occasional cat-painter. A kitten with its eyes shut is one thing; a kitten asleep is another — and one infinitely more difficult to paint, and as a result, very seldom seen. The apparent careless ease of execution should again be noted here, as well as the excellence of draughtmanship. quot;A School of Seience and Artquot; in which kittens are receiving certain impressions of the laws of colour and dynamics, belongs also to 1890. The changes are once more rung upon mother, kittens, and suitable accessories, and the picture is painted perhaps with greater breadth than the majority of the artist's subject-pictures. The disposition of the figures

44

strikes me as being more deliberate than is the custom with Madame Ronner; but nevertheless the character is true and the picture sparkles with life. Among the happiest of our artist's single-figure pictures — but which, indeed, ought perhaps to be called a study — is quot;Banjoquot; which, executed also in 1890, is now in the collection of Mr. H. A. Forster of Queensbury, in Yorkshire. This demure little beast, so quaintly serious and so falsely sober and deceitfully quiet, with as much life in her tail as in her head, and apparently so willing and obliging a model, could not be improved. She lives and breathes upon the canvas and may be held to touch the high-water-mark of Madame Ronner's achievement in this department of work. The charming group which serves for a heading on page 1 was painted as recently as last year, and, it may be added, in four days' time. It is in the possession of Heer Polak of Rotterdam, and may be accepted as an excellent example of the artist's work in the seventy-first year of her age.

To the same recent date belong the two last pictures to which reference must here be made. The first resembles in motif and in treatment the pictures of quot;Chamber Music,quot; quot;The Tirrhuleni Fainilyquot; and others of the sort; for the public now demands anxious mother-cats and mischievous kittens, just as an older generation insisted on the far less graceful and pleasing quot;attelagesquot; The kittens playing about the overturned basket are more or less repetitions of their prototypes in other canvases, both as regards temperament and occupation; but the artist will appreciate the happiness of line in the composition which the painter has so well known how to vary and so skilfully to carry out. The second picture includes all the feline prettinesses in their gentlest aspects, displaying the easy and luxurious life oi the models of Madame Ronner, that pass the span of their existence in a manner worthy of the patrician class to which they belong, and the delightful end oi which they are the merry and often the bewitching means. Compare them for a moment with the powerful study of cats by Fijt which hangs in the Academy of Art at Vienna. There we see five cats, grey and black, painted

with all the impulsive strength ot the great Fleming, and placed in a picture precious for its painter-like qualities. But, wild as tigers, they are drawn in every graceless and even contortionate attitude — forbidding in their fierceness, and repulsive in their ugliness; and possessing every characteristic likely to be sought out and recorded by one violently antipathetic in feeling. It is curious to turn, as I have done, from this picture to that which I have previously described — it is like looking from the Cat's Salvator Rosa to our Titian of Kittens.

The studies, to which we now come, will for some people have even a greater charm than the pictures themselves. These paintings, made hastily from life, represent the impression rapidly received by the artist and almost as rapidly conveyed to paper or canvas. They proclaim her indeed an Impressionist of the first rank, for, whatever their degree of finish, they are convincing and, like the American squirrel, quot;more living than life.quot; The little piebald animal on page 34 was painted in 1883; and those on page 11 — two of them so innocently and unconsciously asleep — in, or about, 1883. A year later the two little wide-awake heads on page 37 were dashed off, as well as the slumbering innocent on page 43 — all on the same canvas. The sketches again, reproduced on pages 8, 15, 20, 26, and 39, all belong to 1890, and like the last, were executed together on the same canvas.

In 1890, too, the handsome Persian cat on page 5 was executed; an animal as well bred as any in the painter's collection. In 1891 the four cats of the same class were painted, which appear on pages 23, 31, 37, and 41, heavy and drowsy in their pampered ease, like so many ladies of the Hareem. The white-pawed cat, in particular, on page 23, strikes the beholder with its truth. So far as perfect resemblance is concerned, it might have been produced from a negative taken by a practised photographer of animals, so accurate is its form, its texture, and above all its pose. It is this knack of catching and reproducing expression that enables our artist to tell — even as Apelles and Zeuxis were wont to boast, if our early art-historians speak the truth — that she has with her brush deceived the perceptive faculties of an animal on the subject of his

ROUND THE WORLD.

.

own species. She had finished the portrait of a dog — for the Count of Flanders, if I mistake not — when a companion of the recent sitter burst into the room, and, espying his friend as he thought, scampered up to the picture and loudly barked out his recognition. On coming closer up to the canvas however, he stopped short, struck silent with wild astonishment, and when he turned aside in sad and frightened bewilderment no persuasion could bring him back to look again on the mysterious apparition.

Many are the subjects such as those which are here reproduced that Madame Ronner has painted for us with unrivalled charm and unerring excellence of execution. That in spite of her venerable age — venerable as the age of practising artists goes — she should be holding her own with the most eminent of her profession is matter for surprise and congratulation. That after all this lapse of time her work should till lately be practically new to our metropolis is equally a misfortune to art-lovers and an injustice to the artist. We have, and have had, cat-painters of ability here in England; in Mr. Couldery, Mr. Walter Hunt, Mr. Arthur Tomson, and Mr. Louis Wain, we have men who understand and appreciate feline beauty and feline character, although they are not of the calibre of Madame Ronner. But the quality of her work has been greatly lost sight of in its subjects. But, surely, the dignified and graceful beast whose praises have been sung by Petrarch and Tasso, by Gray and De Musset, by Chateaubriand and Shelley, by Baudelaire and Keats, by Moncrif and Wordsworth, by Paul de Kock, Champfleury, and Dumas Jih, is worthy of the artist's brush and of the exercise of his most precious talent.

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