Art Throb #28: My Wife's Lovers (1891) by Carl Kahler (1855-1906)

Carl Kahler (1855-1906), My Wife's Lovers (1891)

Oil on canvas, 180 cm × 260 cm (6 ft × 8.5 ft)

Private collection

Talk about a clowder of cats. If ever there was a clowder, this would be one. Cat worship is nothing new, as we know from the Egyptians, and this painting is a celebration of the love of American millionairess Kate Birdsall Johnson for her collection of 350 felines, of which here there are 42. Austrian artist Carl Kahler was reportedly paid $5000 for the commission, which must have been quite a sum in 1891.

Mind you, Kahler did put a lot of work in to this. Never having painted cats before, he spent three years studying their poses in preparation. As a result he he did an excellent job of depicting them in all their kitty glory. A tour de force of cat body language, the painting depicts a convention of well-looked after, well-fed and well-loved kitties, who are apparently given free rein of their sumptuous surroundings. The backdrop of gorgeously-rendered velvets evokes the cats' fur and paws, which no doubt would have been velvety too. I just want to dive in, roll around and let those cats climb all over me.

Whether of human or animal, a good portrait always says so much more than the apparent subject matter, and so it is with this one. I want to believe that these cats arranged themselves like this, or allowed themselves to be arranged, but of course they didn't. Superficially a study of a large group of cats, this is a series of portraits within a portrait, vignettes of different clusters of cats. As such, this is a masterclass in composition, and if you've ever lived with a cat, no doubt you'll see yours here. Ultimately, however, this painting is not just about everycat,  it's really about one cat: the majestically-named Sultan, in the middle, to whom our eye is drawn. Given his own box to sit on, he commands our attention and cuts a venerable figure. While the attention of most of the other cats is occupied elsewhere, with his steady gaze he is an oasis of calm amid the cat chaos. The only cat to be staring straight ahead beyond the frame of the canvas to meet the gaze of the viewer, he stands out from the crowd. The artist has given him dignity and solemnity, which I imagine would have been at the request of the cat's owner.

This is also a painting about the magical relationship that can exist between male cats and their female human owners, of which I am one such owner (the New York Post says Kate Birdsall Johnson was "the world's first cat lady", which I seriously doubt). It was Birdsall Johnson's husband who gave the painting its ingenious title and for those of us captivated by cats, it's not hard to see why he might have seen them as competitors for his wife's attention. Lower down to the left of Sultan there's one who's a dead ringer for my little black cat Vincenzo. Notoriously difficult to photograph, black cats appear to have presented the same challenge to the artist here, and so there is only one against a background of white cats. Throughout the whole painting there is an abundance of fluffy white cats, whose colour pops against the darker colours in the background.

Is this the greatest cat painting in the world? It's must certainly be among the largest: weighing in at 227 pounds it is so large it apparently ripped the nails out of the wall when Sotheby’s in New York tried to hang it, so the auction house had to erect a special wall just to display it. Cats do figure prominently throughout the history of art, and all the ones here are given dignity, a fact that is underscored by the face of the white cat next to Sultan (on our right), which is almost human. At the same time, these cats are still allowed to be cats — miaowing, scratching, hissing, playing, their behaviour is quintessentially kitty. This is no patronising statement about mad cat ladies. The painting doesn't trivialise or make light of the owner's love. It pays tribute to it.