Paintings of Women and Girls with Cats

Paintings of women and girls with cats. This is a genre – who knew? Well, a lot of people besides me, apparently. I was reading through one of my favourite blogs,  Lines and Colors, and lo and behold, the latest post was about  a Flickr set entitled Women and Cats. While I was aware of a few paintings featuring women and cats like Manet’s Olympia with the black cat symbolizing prostitution or the early Picasso, Crazy Woman with Cats (one of my faves at the Chicago Art Institute), I admit I’m a bit surprised by the preponderance of cats with women and girls as an art theme. The symbolism seems to vary quite a bit, too. I suppose it’s not all that  obscure to associate women and cats, and kittens as the appropriate pet for a girl (puppies for boys of course). Even more modern works that question traditional associations like this are still addressing the historical context of the female/feline connection.

All that aside & without further ado, I present a few paintings of women and girls with cats for your perusal – I only included public domain work & artists I was familiar with so this is by no means an exhaustive selection. Since these images come from the aforementioned Flickr set, wikipedia, wikimedia, and various other online sources, attribution was somewhat sketchy. I have given the title in the original language where possible.

I am resisting the temptation to  put lolcats captions under all of them, but it is hard. So very, very hard. Can haz restraint?