Cats in Art History: From Egyptian Gods to Internet Memes
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The cat has always known it was being watched. And it has never, not once in four thousand years of recorded history, seemed particularly bothered about it.
From the tomb walls of ancient Egypt to the canvases of the great masters to the fever-dream of the early internet, the cat has been a constant presence in human art — beloved, feared, worshipped, satirised, and endlessly, compulsively drawn. No other animal has inspired quite so much creative attention across so many cultures and centuries. Not even close.
Here's how we got from there to here.
Ancient Egypt: The Cat as God
It starts, as so many things do, in Egypt.
The ancient Egyptians didn't just like cats — they elevated them to the divine. Bastet, the goddess of home, fertility, and protection, was depicted with the head of a cat. Her cult centre at Bubastis was one of the most visited temples in Egypt, attracting pilgrims from across the ancient world. When a household cat died, the family shaved their eyebrows in mourning. Killing a cat, even accidentally, was punishable by death.
Cats appear everywhere in Egyptian art: painted on tomb walls, cast in bronze as votive offerings, wrapped as mummies to accompany the dead. They're shown hunting, playing, wearing jewellery. One famous papyrus from around 1120 BC — a satirical piece now in the Egyptian Museum in Turin — depicts cats serving mice as their aristocratic masters, waiting on them at table and fanning them with palm leaves.
It's arguably the first cat meme. The Egyptians understood the assignment.
The Middle Ages: A Change in Fortune
The cat's reputation took a rather dark turn in medieval Europe.
Associated with witchcraft, nocturnal mischief, and the devil, cats appear in medieval manuscripts largely as symbols of treachery. They skulk at the edges of illuminated pages, looking sinister. Pope Gregory IX issued a papal decree in 1233 associating black cats specifically with Satanic worship — a piece of religious policy that led to the large-scale persecution of cats across Europe and, historians have argued, contributed to the spread of bubonic plague by removing a key predator of disease-carrying rats.
Medieval art is not, in general, a great period for the cat.
There are exceptions. Cats appear in the margins of illuminated manuscripts doing deeply undignified things — playing musical instruments, riding dogs, jousting — in a tradition of marginalia that feels, again, startlingly modern. Medieval monks apparently couldn't stop drawing cats being ridiculous. Some things are eternal.
The Renaissance: Cats Get Respectable
By the Renaissance, cats were creeping back into serious art — quietly, as befitted their nature.
Leonardo da Vinci made numerous studies of cats in motion, fascinated by their fluid grace. "The smallest feline is a masterpiece," he reportedly said, which remains one of the most accurate sentences ever written. His sketches show cats nursing kittens, fighting, curled in sleep — observed with the same scientific intensity he brought to human anatomy.
Cats appear in Renaissance religious paintings as subtle presences: in Nativity scenes, in depictions of the Last Supper (where a cat sometimes sits pointedly near Judas), in domestic interiors as symbols of femininity or, occasionally, lust. Federico Barocci's Madonna of the Cat from around 1575 places a cat front and centre in a tender domestic scene, the animal connecting the sacred and the everyday with characteristic feline indifference.
They were getting there. Slowly.
The 17th and 18th Centuries: Cats Go Domestic
In the Dutch Golden Age, cats became fixtures of domestic interior painting — which made sense, since they were fixtures of actual domestic interiors. Jan Steen painted them underfoot in chaotic households. They appear in kitchen scenes, warming themselves by fires, stealing fish from tables with magnificent lack of remorse.
Hogarth included cats in his moral tableaux, usually as indicators of neglected domesticity or chaos. In The Graham Children (1742), a family portrait of impeccable sweetness, a cat eyes a caged bird with an expression of barely suppressed intent that rather punctures the idyll. Hogarth understood cats.
In Japan, the Edo period produced an extraordinary flowering of cat imagery. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, one of the masters of woodblock printing, was famously obsessed with cats — he kept dozens of them in his studio and incorporated them into prints whenever possible. His series depicting cats arranged to spell out words in Japanese, or dressed as kabuki actors, are joyful, absurd, and technically brilliant. Katsushika Hokusai — whose Great Wave remains one of the most reproduced images in history — also painted cats, including several studies of extraordinary delicacy.
The 19th and 20th Centuries: The Masters Take Notice
The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists brought cats into modern art with full seriousness.
Édouard Manet's Cats series of lithographs are spare, assured, and beautiful — the cat reduced to its essential silhouette. Pierre Bonnard wove cats into his intimate domestic interiors until they became as much a part of the scene as the patterned wallpaper or the afternoon light. Pablo Picasso drew cats obsessively throughout his career, with a particular interest in the violence and tension beneath the domestic surface — his Cat Catching a Bird (1939) is both a painting of a cat and, painted at the start of World War II, unmistakably something else.
Franz Marc, the German Expressionist, painted cats in vivid blues and yellows as part of his broader project to see the world through the eyes of animals. Andy Warhol — before he was Andy Warhol — published a charming book of cat illustrations called 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy in the 1950s, hand-lettered and limited-edition, which now sells for extraordinary sums when it appears at auction.
The cat, by the 20th century, had thoroughly colonised serious art. Which brings us to the question of why.
Why Artists Can't Stop Drawing Cats
There are practical reasons. Cats are available, domestic, and — unlike dogs — tend to hold poses long enough to be drawn, because they spend most of their time asleep or engaged in the elaborate stillness of watching something.
But the deeper reason, we suspect, is that cats are interesting in a way that resists easy interpretation. A dog's expression is legible — happy, anxious, loyal, eager. A cat's expression is not. It could be contentment. It could be disdain. It could be the prelude to sudden violence. That inscrutability is endlessly fascinating to artists, who are generally in the business of trying to capture interiority on a flat surface. A cat sits for you and refuses to be read, and that's a creative challenge.
Cats also exist, somehow, both inside and outside human domestic life simultaneously. They accept warmth and food and affection on their own terms. They are present and absent at the same time. That paradox — belonging without submitting — has made them irresistible subjects for artists across every culture and century.
The Internet: Full Circle
And then, sometime around 2006, it all accelerated.
The internet didn't invent cat content — as we've established, humans have been producing cat content since at least 1120 BC — but it did industrialise it. LOLcats. Keyboard Cat. Grumpy Cat. Nyan Cat. The endless scroll of cats in boxes, cats startled by cucumbers, cats sitting in circles drawn on the floor. The internet became, among other things, the greatest archive of cat imagery in human history.
What's striking is how closely this mirrors the medieval manuscript tradition — the same impulse to add cats doing absurd things to the margins of serious documents, to make the domestic creature ridiculous and beloved at the same time. The monks who drew cats jousting in the margins of their psalters would have understood TikTok cat content immediately. The specific technology changes. The cat stays exactly the same.
Our Cats in the Tradition
We like to think our cat art prints sit somewhere in this long tradition — the impulse to take a great artist's vision and put a cat in it, which turns out to be both an act of homage and an act of gentle comedy.
Our Mondrian Cat arranges a feline in blocks of primary colour with the same austere precision Piet Mondrian brought to De Stijl — and somehow the cat makes it funnier and more human without diminishing it. Our Van Gogh Cat swirls in the same emotional intensity as Starry Night. Our Basquiat Cat brings the raw, graffiti-inflected energy of Jean-Michel Basquiat's Neo-Expressionism to a subject he himself would probably have appreciated.
And our Hokusai Cat — well. Kuniyoshi would have approved. We're fairly sure of it.
Four thousand years of humans drawing cats, and we're still at it. The cat, as ever, remains unmoved.
Explore our full cat art print collection — free worldwide delivery on all orders.