There are many ways of rendering cats in illustration. By letting ink run into the paper, cats can look beautifully soft and furry.
Inky Illustrations of Cats
Women and Cats in Art
There is a strong link between women, girls and cats. In fiction, for instance, women are frequently described as cats (and also as birds).
Then there’s the witch link between women and cats, who are thought to be witches’ familiars. During the witch craze, a small proportion of men were also tried for witchcraft, but the modern witch archetype is an old woman who sometimes transmogrifies into a beautiful young woman in order to trick men or to test them.
Then there’s the modern dismissive archetype of the ‘crazy cat lady’, for which there is no male counterpart.
Below are some artworks celebrating the relationship between women, girls and their cats.
Balinese, Birman, Burmese and Siamese Cats In Art
The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Wind In The Willows is an Edwardian (1908) novel by Scottish born British writer Kenneth Grahame. This book is an example of a story from the First Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Idyllic settings were popular at the time. Idylls remained popular up to and including A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books (written 1924-1928).
Continue reading “The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame”Fish Bowls In Art
The fishbowl is a common symbol of surveillance, as is a glass house. For house cats, the fish bowl is a miniature version of the pond or lake — domestic version.
Header painting: George Dunlop Leslie – The Goldfish Seller
Symbolism of Birds
![VERNEUIL, Maurice Pillard (1869-1942). L'Animal dans la décoration. Paris- Librairie centrale des Beaux-arts, [1897] Birds Snails](https://i1.wp.com/www.slaphappylarry.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/VERNEUIL-Maurice-Pillard-1869-1942.-LAnimal-dans-la-decoration.-Paris-Librairie-centrale-des-Beaux-arts-1897-Birds-Snails.jpg?resize=1024%2C765&ssl=1)
Birds are much older than we are — living dinosaurs. Across cultures, birds function as smart collaborators with humans. We now know how smart (some) birds really are, but we have long had a sense of their canniness. The smartest bird in the world is currently thought to be the New Zealand Kea, which isn’t so great if you live in New Zealand and the kea is chewing the bits of rubber off your car.
New Zealand’s kakapo is also a bit of a… character.
BIRDS AND THE ANCIENT GREEKS
Birds are frequently utilised in tales of transmogrification. Wings are frequently stuck onto chimerae. This surely has something to do with humans’ long-held wish-fulfilment fantasy of being able to fly.
Take the Ancient Greek mythological siren.
Bird symbolism in the Greek imagination was common. Reverse-engineering the meaning of all these story-birds isn’t easy. For instance, we’ll never know for sure why Sirens took the form of a hybrid bird-woman, but we do know that in ancient mythology birds represented a number of things:
- oracles
- enchantresses
- messengers of deities
- mediators (between the human world and the supernatural realm)
Continue reading “Symbolism of Birds”Over the centuries, however, the Siren transformed. In the Middle Ages, the spread of Christianity throughout Europe saw the Siren morph from a bird-woman into a fish-bodied being, who personified the dangers of both the sea and female sexuality. The seventh-century medieval bestiary Liber monstruorum diversis generibus, or the “Book of Monsters,” is one of the earliest examples of this transition, describing Sirens as sea-girls who “are like human beings from the head to the navel, with the body of a maiden, but have scaly fish tails, with which they always lurk in the sea.” Illustrations from the period clearly reveal the difference; the Sirens now have voluptuous bodies, perform erotic moves, and exhibit brazen tactics of seduction, such as staring longingly into mirrors and combing their hair. These Sirens no longer symbolized the spirit, but rather, the pleasures of the flesh.
Vice
Owl At Home by Arnold Lobel
Owl At Home is a 1975 picture book written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel. The book comprises five very short early reader stories about a kind, anxious and lonely owl. These owl stories, along with the frog and toad stories come from the second phase of Lobel’s creative career, in which he tapped into his own emotions and acknowledged he was writing “adult stories, slightly disguised as children’s stories”.
In the classroom, Lobel’s picture book would make a good companion to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “To The Moon“. Owl At Home would also make a good introduction to discussions about the theme of loneliness, present in a great many works.
Owl lives by himself in a regular Western-style dream house (with the upstairs, the hearth, and everything you’d expect to see in a picture book dream house). Although published in the 1970s, there’s nothing 70s about this dream house — there are 1800s/early 1900s details, such as the candle beside the bed. (There doesn’t seem to be electricity.) Picture books set in this era feel atemporal to a modern audience. I’m not sure if this house is in fact inside a tree, because we don’t get an establishing shot.
Amos and Boris by William Steig
Some picture books have an Aesop fable at their base. Amos and Boris is one such picture book, written and illustrated by William Steig (1971). Amos and Boris is also a romance in the style of Nicholas Sparks. (Sorry, Nick Sparks doesn’t like it when his books are called romances, so let’s use his word: love tragedy.)
Continue reading “Amos and Boris by William Steig”Cats Looking Out Windows
Below is a collection of artwork and illustration featuring cats looking out of windows. I bet they’re wishing they were outside.
Lu Green 
S Lee 
Bettina Baldassari
And of course you can’t have cats wishing to head outside without cats also wishing to come back in. So here are a few catslooking inside a window from the outside.
Foxes In Children’s Literature
A fox is a wolf who sends flowers.
Ruth Weston
Arthur Applebee asked a group of pre-school children to tell him the characters of a list of animals. They were more certain of the stereotypical personalities of animals they could only have met in stories, such as brave lions or sly foxes, than of the characters of dogs or cats, where experience of specific dogs and cats came in to complicate the picture. Story characteristics are prepared for reception, so to speak; they’re consistent, they don’t contradict themselves, and they’re dispensed at the pace that understanding demands.
The Child That Books Built, Frances Spufford
