Concerning Cat Artists 



In the Luxembourg Gallery, Mr. Lambert's " Fam- 

 ily of Cats" is considered one of the finest cat 

 pictures in the world. In this painting the mother 

 sits upon a table watching the antics of her four 

 frivolous kittens. There is a wonderful smoothness 

 of touch and refinement of treatment that have never 

 yet been excelled. "After the Banquet" is another 

 excellent example of the same smoothness of execu- 

 tion, with fulness of action instead of repose. And 

 yet there is an undeniable lack of the softer attributes 

 which should be evident in the faces of the group. 



It is here that Madame Ronner excels all other cat 

 painters, Uving or dead. She not only infuses a 

 wonderful degree of life into her little figures, but 

 reproduces the shades of expression, shifting and 

 variable as the sands of the sea, as no other artist of 

 the brush has done. Asleep or awake, her cats look 

 exactly to the " felinarian " like cats with whom he 

 or she is familiar. Curiosity, drowsiness, indifference, 

 alertness, love, hate, anxiety, temper, innocence, cun- 

 ning, fear, confidence, mischief, earnestness, dignity, 

 helplessness, — they are all in Madame Ronner's cats' 

 faces, just as we see them in our own cats. 



Madame Ronner is the daughter of Josephus Au- 

 gustus Knip, a landscape painter of some celebrity 

 sixty years ago, and from her father she received her 

 first art education. She is now over seventy years 

 old, and for nearly fifty years has made her home 

 in Brussels. There, she and her happy cats, a big 



175 



