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# The Most Famous Cat Paintings in Art History
- URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/most-famous-cat-paintings/
- Published: 2026-05-27T12:26:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T21:58:47.000Z
- Description: From Steinlen’s black cat poster to the forty-two Persians of My Wife’s Lovers — eight cat pictures that earned their place in art history.
- Author: Fine Art America
- Tags: Famous Paintings, Art History

**The most famous cat image in art history is Théophile Steinlen’s Tournée du Chat Noir of 1896 — the black cat in a red halo, made to advertise a Montmartre cabaret. Behind it stand Manet’s Olympia, Carl Kahler’s forty-two-cat canvas My Wife’s Lovers, and the three cats staring out of Goya’s portrait of Manuel Osorio.**

## [Tournée du Chat Noir — Théophile Steinlen, 1896](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-tournee-du-chat-noir-theophile-alexandre-steinlen.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Tournée du Chat Noir de Rodolphe Salis — Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, 1896](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/4-tournee-du-chat-noir-theophile-alexandre-steinlen-3.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-tournee-du-chat-noir-theophile-alexandre-steinlen.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Tournée du Chat Noir de Rodolphe Salis — Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, 1896

Le Chat Noir opened in Montmartre in 1881 and became the model for every bohemian cabaret that followed: poets, anarchists, songwriters and a celebrated shadow-puppet theater, all presided over by its proprietor Rodolphe Salis. When Salis took the show on tour he asked Steinlen for a poster, and what he got was not a picture of a cat but a coat of arms — a black tom seen head-on, ears flat, whiskers bristling, planted against a red-gold disc that reads unmistakably as a halo.

Steinlen (1859–1923) was Swiss, worked in Montmartre, and drew cats for forty years because he lived among them. The cabaret closed in 1897; [the poster has outlasted it by more than a century](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-tournee-du-chat-noir-theophile-alexandre-steinlen.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).

## [Olympia — Édouard Manet, 1863](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/24-olympia-edouard-manet.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Olympia — Édouard Manet, 1863 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/24-olympia-edouard-manet-3.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/24-olympia-edouard-manet.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Olympia — Édouard Manet, 1863 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

The cat is easy to miss and impossible to unsee: a small black animal at the foot of the bed, back arched, tail up, staring straight out of the canvas. Manet painted [Olympia](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/24-olympia-edouard-manet.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) in 1863 as a deliberate rewriting of Titian’s *Venus of Urbino*, and almost every change he made was a provocation. Titian’s Venus has a small dog curled asleep at her feet — the standard emblem of fidelity. Manet swapped it for a cat.

When the picture was finally shown at the Salon of 1865 it caused one of the loudest scandals of the century; guards were posted, and caricaturists went straight for the cat. The model was Victorine Meurent, a painter in her own right. The canvas now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay.

## [My Wife’s Lovers — Carl Kahler, 1891](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-my-wifes-lovers-carl-kahler.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![My Wife’s Lovers — Carl Kahler, 1891](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/4-my-wifes-lovers-carl-kahler-3.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-my-wifes-lovers-carl-kahler.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

My Wife’s Lovers — Carl Kahler, 1891

Kate Birdsall Johnson, a San Francisco philanthropist, kept dozens of cats at her country house and commissioned the Austrian painter Carl Kahler to record them. Kahler had never painted an animal before. He is said to have spent three years on the job, sketching individual cats for weeks before beginning the canvas — which measures roughly six feet by eight and a half and weighs over two hundred pounds in its frame.

Forty-two cats fill it, most of them Turkish Angoras and Persians, with a white cat named Sultan at the center. The title was reportedly her husband’s joke. In 2015 [the painting sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $826,000](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-my-wifes-lovers-carl-kahler.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), the highest price ever paid for a picture of cats.

## [Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga — Francisco de Goya, c. 1787–88](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-manuel-osorio-manrique-de-zuniga-francisco-de-goya.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga (The Red Boy) — Francisco de Goya, c. 1787–88 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/1-manuel-osorio-manrique-de-zuniga-francisco-de-goya-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-manuel-osorio-manrique-de-zuniga-francisco-de-goya.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga (The Red Boy) — Francisco de Goya, c. 1787–88 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

A three-year-old boy in a scarlet suit holds a magpie on a string. The bird carries Goya’s calling card in its beak — the painter’s signature, hidden in plain sight. To the left sits a cage of finches. And out of the darkness at the boy’s feet, three cats watch the magpie with an attention that turns a charming child portrait into something with teeth.

Goya painted it in Madrid around 1787–88 for the Count of Altamira’s family; the boy died young. Whether the cats were meant as an emblem of the fragility of innocence or simply as good observation, they are the most quietly menacing animals in eighteenth-century portraiture. [The painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-manuel-osorio-manrique-de-zuniga-francisco-de-goya.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).

## [Woman with a Cat — Pierre-Auguste Renoir, c. 1875](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/8-woman-with-a-cat-pierre-auguste-renoir.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Woman with a Cat — Pierre-Auguste Renoir, c. 1875](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/8-woman-with-a-cat-pierre-auguste-renoir-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/8-woman-with-a-cat-pierre-auguste-renoir.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Woman with a Cat — Pierre-Auguste Renoir, c. 1875

Renoir returned to the girl-and-cat subject again and again, and this is the warmest version of it: a young woman in white gathering a heavy tabby against her chest, her cheek almost touching its head, both of them half-dissolved into the same loose, feathery brushwork. Nothing is described sharply. The cat’s fur, the sitter’s hair and the striped upholstery behind her are all painted with the same short, curved strokes, so that the two bodies read as one soft mass.

It is a good illustration of what separates Renoir from the animal painters of his day. He was not interested in the cat as a specimen; [he was interested in the weight and heat of a living thing being held](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/8-woman-with-a-cat-pierre-auguste-renoir.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com).

## [A Sleeping Cat — Henriette Ronner-Knip, 1896](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-a-sleeping-cat-henriette-ronner-knip.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![A Sleeping Cat — Henriette Ronner-Knip, 1896](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/1-a-sleeping-cat-henriette-ronner-knip-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-a-sleeping-cat-henriette-ronner-knip.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

A Sleeping Cat — Henriette Ronner-Knip, 1896

Henriette Ronner-Knip (1821–1909) was the most commercially successful painter of cats who ever lived. Dutch by birth and Belgian by adoption, she began with dogs and farm animals and switched to cats in middle age, at which point her career took off: royal patrons, sold-out exhibitions, and a waiting list.

Her method was practical. She built a glass-fronted studio cage so that kittens could be observed at close range without escaping, and she worked from photographs as well as from life. [This sleeping ginger longhair](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-a-sleeping-cat-henriette-ronner-knip.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), signed and dated 1896, is her subject at its simplest — no ribbons, no upholstered props, just the exact way a cat collapses into a curve when it stops being awake.

## [The Bachelor Party — Louis Wain](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-bachelor-party-louis-wain.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Bachelor Party — Louis Wain](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/the-bachelor-party-louis-wain-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-bachelor-party-louis-wain.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The Bachelor Party — Louis Wain

Five cats sit at a table with bottles, glasses and a scatter of cards, wide-eyed and entirely at home in a human vice. Louis Wain (1860–1939) drew thousands of pictures like it for Edwardian magazines, annuals and Christmas books, and he changed the way an entire country felt about cats: he was president of the National Cat Club, and H. G. Wells said that he had invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world.

Wain spent his last fifteen years in psychiatric hospitals, and his late kaleidoscopic cats are often paraded as a diagram of schizophrenia. That story does not survive scrutiny — [the works were never reliably dated](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-bachelor-party-louis-wain.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), and he drew conventional cats to the end.

## [Slapende Kat (Sleeping Cat) — Julie de Graag, 1917](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/slapende-kat-julie-de-graag.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Slapende Kat (Sleeping Cat) — Julie de Graag, 1917](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/slapende-kat-julie-de-graag-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/slapende-kat-julie-de-graag.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Slapende Kat (Sleeping Cat) — Julie de Graag, 1917

Everything Ronner-Knip achieved with fur, Julie de Graag achieves with an outline. Her sleeping cat is reduced to a gray oval, a black keyhole of a face and a few white nicks of ground where the gouge lifted the block — a woodcut so economical it looks a century younger than it is.

De Graag (1877–1924) trained in The Hague and worked in near-total obscurity, plagued by ill health, producing a small body of prints and drawings before her death in 1924\. [This print, dated 1917](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/slapende-kat-julie-de-graag.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), has since circulated everywhere through museum open-access collections, and it is the reason a great many people now know her name at all.

## Frequently asked questions

### What is the most famous cat painting in art history?

Théophile Steinlen’s 1896 poster Tournée du Chat Noir — the black cat against a red halo — is the most widely reproduced cat image ever made, though it is a lithograph rather than a painting. Among paintings, the strongest claims belong to Manet’s Olympia, where a black cat replaces Titian’s sleeping dog, and Carl Kahler’s My Wife’s Lovers, a six-foot canvas of forty-two cats.

### Why is there a black cat in Manet’s Olympia?

Manet based Olympia on Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which has a small dog asleep at the model’s feet as a symbol of fidelity. Replacing it with a bristling black cat inverted the reference: cats carried associations of independence, night and sexual license rather than loyalty. Critics at the 1865 Salon fixed on the animal immediately, and caricaturists made it the emblem of the scandal.

### What is the most expensive cat painting ever sold?

Carl Kahler’s My Wife’s Lovers, painted in 1891 for the San Francisco philanthropist Kate Birdsall Johnson, sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 2015 for $826,000\. It shows forty-two of her cats, mostly Persians and Turkish Angoras, on a canvas roughly six feet by eight and a half — large enough that the framed picture weighs over two hundred pounds.

### Who was the greatest painter of cats?

By reputation and by sales, Henriette Ronner-Knip (1821–1909). She switched from farm animals to cats in middle age and built an entire late career on them, painting kittens observed through a purpose-built glass studio cage. For cats as characters rather than animals, the equivalent figure is Louis Wain, whose anthropomorphic drawings shaped how Edwardian Britain saw the domestic cat.

### Why do cats appear less often than dogs in old master paintings?

Dogs had a defined place in European portraiture as hunting companions and emblems of loyalty, and they could be posed. Cats had no such role: they were working animals kept for vermin, they carried unlucky and diabolical associations, and they will not sit still. Until the nineteenth century they mostly appear as incidental detail in kitchens and interiors rather than as subjects in their own right.

### Did Louis Wain’s cat pictures really show his schizophrenia?

Almost certainly not in the way the popular sequence suggests. The famous progression from realistic cats to fractured, kaleidoscopic ones is a later arrangement: the works were not reliably dated, and Wain went on producing conventional cat pictures throughout his years in psychiatric hospitals. The decorative late patterns are better read as design experiments than as a clinical chart.

Almost every picture above is old enough to be in the public domain, which is why these cats turn up on tote bags, tea towels and museum walls alike. If you would rather have one properly printed, all eight are available as [canvas](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/canvas+prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), [framed](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/framed+prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) and [art](https://fineartamerica.com/shop/prints?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) reproductions, and you can browse the wider [cat art collection](https://fineartamerica.com/art/cat?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) or the rest of our [famous paintings](https://fineartamerica.com/art/famous+paintings?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) for more.