© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
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Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an
Artist’s Atelier

1657

Gerrit Dou(Leiden 1613 – 1675 Leiden)

34 x 26.9 cm

oil on panel
signed and dated in brown paint along lower
edge: “GDou 1657”
GD-108Currently on view at: The National Museum ofChina, Beijing

How To Cite
Surh, Dominique. "Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier." In The Leiden Collection Catalogue.
Edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. New York, 2017.
https://www.theleidencollection.com/archive/.
This page is available on the site's Archive. PDF of every version of this page is available on the Archive,
and the Archive is managed by a permanent URL. Archival copies will never be deleted. New versions areadded only when a substantive change to the narrative occurs.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
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Gerrit Dou, consummate master of artifice, was renowned for the[1]

illusionism of his niche pictures.

Comparative Figures

As in this remarkable painting, Dou

would place figural elements within the opening of a niche, a motif thatserved both as a framing device and an illusionistic construct. Dou not only
situated these niches at the very front of the picture plane, but he also
placed pictorial elements, like the tail of the cat in this picture, so that theyextended into the viewer’s realm. To reinforce the connection to theexternal world, Dou always placed his light source so that it appeared toilluminate the front of the niche, generally from the upper left. The nichemotif, thus, allowed Dou to examine issues of reality and illusionism thatFig 1. Detail of cat’s head, Cat
Crouching on the Ledge of an
Artist’s Atelier, GD-108

were central to his artistic concerns, ones that he reinforced in the
meticulous rendering of different materials and textures, ranging from hardstone to soft fur.
In this striking painting Dou portrayed a grey-and-white-striped cat
crouching in profile on a stone niche opening into an artist’s studio, a
subject that is unique in the artist’s oeuvre.[2] The cat’s individualized
character and the specificity of the portrayal suggest that it was modeled
after a particular animal.[3] Using a brush consisting of only a few bristles,
Dou applied countless minuscule strokes of multicolored paint to create
the cat’s plush fur (fig 1). With its tail that seems to twitch, alert eyes, andunmistakable curiosity animating its presence, the cat appears alive as it

Fig 2. X-radiograph of Cat
Crouching on the Ledge of an
Artist’s Atelier, GD-108

focuses its attention on something to the right of the picture plane.
Dou appears to have conceived this unusual painting with a quite different
composition. X-radiographs have shown that Dou initially painted a young
woman leaning forward toward the cat before painting the red curtain
hanging from the niche [(fig 2) and (fig 3)].[4] An infrared reflectogram
reveals a small rectangular shape in the lower right corner of thewindowsill that may have been a mousetrap [(fig 4) and (fig 5)].[5]Technical photographs also suggest that the niche once extended beyond
the upper and right edges of the panel, suggesting that Dou initially began
painting on a larger panel that he later reduced in format. This idea isreinforced by the fact that only a single bevel is found on the reverse of thepanel, by which one can infer that the panel has been trimmed down on
the other three sides.[6]Fig 3. X-radiograph of Cat
Crouching on the Ledge of an
Artist’s Atelier, GD-108, with Xray superimposed in registration
with the visual image (composite:
John Twilley)

Other composition changes may also have occurred. The X-radiographand infrared photograph indicate that a curtain was initially gathered about© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
Page 4 of 14

two-thirds up the left side of the painting and that a circular object once
existed in the center-left, perhaps a globe resting on a table ([fig 6) and(fig 7)].[7] Nevertheless, it is not certain whether or not these pictorial
elements were part of a preliminary stage of the final composition or
belonged to an earlier, altogether unrelated scene.[8]A painting focused on a cat is quite unusual in seventeenth-century
painting.[9] The most comparable image occurs not in a painting but in an
engraving—Cornelis Visscher’s (1629–58) The Large Cat, ca. 1657 (fig8). Not only do the two works date from about the same year, they both
portray a crouching feline in profile. Although Dou may have known of thisprint and it may have inspired his painting, a direct connection seems

Fig 4. Infrared reflectogram of Cat
Crouching on the Ledge of an
Artist’s Atelier, GD-108

unlikely since the two works are quite different in character. The cat in
Visscher’s engraving is dozing and has not noticed a small mouse inbehind it, whereas Dou’s cat is alert and alive, intently gazing into the
distance.[10]Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier relates to a very different
iconographic tradition than that of Visscher’s engraving, one that stems
from the animal’s reputation for extraordinary vision. This attribute wasoften exploited by late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century artists intheir depictions of the Allegory of Sight (Visus).[11] An engraving from1595, Sense of Sight by Jan Saenredam (1565–1607) after a design by

Fig 5. Detail of infrared
reflectogram of Cat Crouching on
the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier,
GD-108, showing silhouette ofwhat appears to be a mousetrap
in the lower right corner

Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), shows a cat, possibly an exotic lynx,
looking out at the viewer, while a woman wearing a plunging décolleté
admires herself in the mirror as her suitor embraces her and gazes
wantonly at her bosom (fig 9).[12] This aspect of sight is further expressedby the poignant gaze of the feline crouching next to Adam and Eve in
Hendrick Golztius’s Fall of Man in the National Gallery of Art, Washington(fig 10).[13] Reinterpreted here with the familiarity and immediacy of daily
life, Dou emphasizes the cat as the embodiment of sight by highlighting its
intense gaze and alert demeanor.
As in many of his other niche scenes, Dou also includes a scene in the
deep recesses of the background that enhances the painting’s

Fig 6. Infrared photograph of Cat
Crouching on the Ledge of an
Artist’s Atelier, GD-108

iconographic meaning. Here one sees an artist painting at his easel.
Although Dou often included easels in the backgrounds of his paintings,
nowhere else does he depict an artist actively engaged in painting.[14] Near
the artist is a violin resting on a table, a reference to the parallels that exist© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
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between a musician and a painter, both of whom use the imagination tocreate their works of art.[15]The prominent red curtain, beautifully depicted with subtle violet highlights
shimmering in the cascading of light across the iridescent fabric, also
relates to the painting’s underlying concern for the interrelationship of
illusion and reality. The depiction of such a dazzling curtain evokes thefamous story from classical antiquity of Parrhasius, whose painting of acurtain was depicted in such a lifelike manner that it fooled his artistic rival,
Zeuxis, who asked that it be pulled aside to reveal the supposedlyconcealed painting beneath it. The story of artistic rivalry was retold byseventeenth-century art theorists such as Karel van Mander (1548–1606)
in his Schilder-Boeck (1604) and by Phillips Angel (ca. 1618–62) in his
Praise of Painting (1642).[16] Dou explicitly referenced the anecdote inFig 7. Infrared photographsuperimposed on X-radiographwith inverted density grayscale of
Cat Crouching on the Ledge ofan Artist’s
Atelier, GD-108 (composite: John
Twilley)

Painter with a Pipe and Book from ca. 1645 in the Rijksmuseum in
Amsterdam (fig 11).[17] Dou was often praised for his convincing
illusionism by contemporaries like the poet Dirck Traudenius, who referred
to Dou in 1662 as the “Dutch Parrhasius.”[18]The question remains as to why Dou turned his iconographic focus from afigural group involving a cat, a mousetrap, and young woman to asimplified scene of a cat alone within an architectural niche. The
iconography of the cat and mousetrap was relatively novel in genre
painting in the 1650s, and with his initial layout of the composition, Dou
may have intended to explore the symbolism of love’s entrapment.[19] The

Fig 8. Cornelis Visscher, The
Large Cat, ca. 1657, engraving onlaid paper, 22.1 x 31.5 cm,
National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C., Ailsa Mellon
Bruce Fund, 1995.72.1

earlier compositional idea relates to paintings Dou made somewhat earlier
in the 1650s, such as Kitchen Scene in Copenhagen, Statens Museum for
Kunst, or The Mousetrap in Montpellier, Musée Fabre (fig 12).[20] Dou’s
final image emphasizing the cat’s sense of sight was an innovative way of
reinterpreting this pictorial tradition to relate this theme to the status of theartist.
The present work is one of three known paintings by Dou featuring
animals.[21] King Augustus II acquired Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an
Artist’s Atelier in the early eighteenth century for the imperial housecollections of the Royal Palace in Dresden, where it remained, withnineteen other autograph paintings by Dou, until the third decade of thetwentieth century.[22] In the 1920s the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden deaccessioned the painting, and handed the work over to the former RoyalFig 9. Jan Saenredam, after
Hendrick Goltzius, Sight, ca.
1595–96, engraving, 177 x 124
mm, Rijksprentenkabinet,
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RPP-1884-A-7717© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
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House of Wettin as part of a group of restituted artworks from the State of
Saxony.[23] It was subsequently acquired by a private collector in Germany.
It remained in that collection until 2006, when it was acquired by the
Leiden Collection.
-Dominique SurhFig 10. Hendrick Goltzius, Fall ofMan, 1616, oil on canvas, 104.5 x
138.4 cm, National Gallery of Art,
Washington D.C., Patrons’
Permanent Fund, 1996.34.1

Fig 11. Gerrit Dou, Painter with
Pipe and Book, ca. 1645, oil on
panel, 48 x 37 cm, Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam, SK-A-86

Fig 12. Gerrit Dou, The
Mousetrap, ca. 1650, oil on panel,
47 x 36 cm, Musée Fabre,
Montpellier, © Musée Fabre —Montpellier Agglomération / cliché
F. Jaulmes© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
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Endnotes
1. Dou painted these so-called “niche” pictures from the mid-1640s until the end of his career(see GD-103, GD-105, and GD-106). See Angela Ho, “Gerrit Dou’s Niche Pictures: Pictorial
Repetition and Marketing Strategy,” Athanor 25 (2007): 59–67.
2. Felis silvestris catus descends from the wildcat. See Luke Hunter, Carnivores of theWorld (Princeton, 2011), 7, 16.
3. The portraitlike character of the cat was noted in 1859 in the given title, “Master Dou’s
Housecat,” when it hung, beginning in 1817, in the northern gallery of the Royal Picture
Gallery in Dresden. See W. Schäfer, Die Könligliche Gemälde-Gallerie zu Dresden zur
Erleichterung eingehender Studien in der Geschickte der Malerei und deren Kunstkritik /Allen Jüngern und Freunden der Kunst nach der Ordnung der Räume beschreibend underläuternd vorgefürht und mit einem resumirenden Verzeichnisse der Maler begleitet , 2
vols. (Dresden, 1859), 2:672–73, no. 1077.
4. Ronni Baer has suggested that the young woman originally belonged to a separate
composition and that when she was painted out, the cat and the curtain were painted in.
Baer speculates that the young woman was intended as part of an independent kitchen
scene and was shown leaning forward to pour from a jug. See Ronni Baer, “Of Cats andDogs: Domestic Pets in Rembrandt and Dou,” in Een Kroniek voor Jeroen Giltaij: Kroniek
van het Rembrandthuis (2012): 67–69. n. 19, fig. 4.
5. The object has a diagonal lever at the top and is strikingly similar to other mousetraps inpaintings of the period, as seen, for example, in Domenicus van Tol’sBoy with a Mousetrap
by Candlelight, from ca. 1664–65 (DT-100) or in Dou’s Girl with a Cat and Mousetrap (fig.
6). For a different interpretation of the changes visible in the X-radiograph, see Ronni Baer,“Of Cats and Dogs: Domestic Pets in Rembrandt and Dou,” in Een Kroniek voor Jeroen
Giltaij: Kroniek van het Rembrandthuis (2012): 67–69.
6. On the beveling of the panel’s reverse on the left side, see Annette Rupprecht, “Gerrit Dou,
A Cat Crouching in a Ledge , GD-108,” technical report dated March 2012, kept on file, The
Leiden Collection, New York.
7. The infrared photograph was taken with a InGaAs camera with 1500–1680nm, bandpass
filter (photograph: Shawn Digney-Peer). The globe appears not to have been painted but
merely planned. See Dominique Surh, Ilona van Tuinen, and John Twilley, “Insights fromTechnical Analysis on a Group of Paintings by Gerrit Dou in the Leiden Collection,”Journalof Historians of Netherlandish Art 6, no. 1 (Winter, 2014).
8. For an argument that Dou incorporated the cat in the initial stage of the preparatory design
because its silhouette was left in reserve and remained unchanged despite the othermodifications to the composition, see Dominique Surh, Ilona van Tuinen, and John Twilley,© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
Page 8 of 14“Insights from Technical Analysis on a Group of Paintings by Gerrit Dou in the Leiden
Collection,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 6, no. 1 (Winter, 2014). Arthur
Wheelock (verbal communication with Dominique Surh) has questioned this conclusion
since no evidence of a reserve is seen in the X-radiograph of the painting.
9. Cats were often included in painting as ancillary figures, with a wide array of associations
and meanings. For a survey of the cat in Dutch seventeenth-century painting, see Susan
Donahue Kuretsky, “Rembrandt’s Cat,” in Aemulatio: Imitation, Emulation and Invention in
Netherlandish Art from 1500 to 1800; Essays in Honor of Eric Jan Sluijter (Zwolle, 2011),
263–76.
10. Susan Donahue Kuretsky, “Rembrandt’s Cat,” in Aemulatio: Imitation, Emulation andInvention in Netherlandish Art from 1500 to 1800; Essays in Honor of Eric Jan Sluijter(Zwolle, 2011), 263–76, fig. 4.
11. I would like to thank Eric Jan Sluijter for suggesting, back in 2008, that the present painting
could be a reference to the Allegory of Sight. See Eric Jan Sluijter, “Venus, Visus, andPictura,” in Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age ( Zwolle, 2000)
87–159, esp. 90–91. On the wide range of meanings associated with the cat in theseventeenth century, see Susan Donahue Kuretsky, “Rembrandt’s Cat,” in Aemulatio:
Imitation, Emulation and Invention in Netherlandish Art from 1500 to 1800; Essays in Honorof Eric Jan Sluijter (Zwolle, 2011), 263–76, esp. 266, n.7; for a discussion of the cat in theemblematic tradition, see Ronni Baer, “Of Cats and Dogs: Domestic Pets in Rembrandt andDou,” in Een Kroniek voor Jeroen Giltaij: Kroniek van he Rembrandthuis (2012): 67.
12. The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450–1700:
Hendrick Goltzius, vol. 4, compiled by Harjolein Leesberg and edited by Huigen Leeflang(Ouderkerk aan den IJssel, 2012), 106–14, nos. 694–98. The inscription at the bottom ofSaenredam’s Sense of Sight reads: “Dum male lascivi nimium cohibentur ocelli / In vitium
praeceps stulta ruit” (While wickedly wanton eyes are too confined / foolish youth falls
headlong into vice [trans. David Ratzen]). The choice of a lynx in the Allegory of Sight isperhaps significant, since the word “lynx” comes from the Indo-European root of a word thatmeans “light” or “brightness,” in reference to the wildcat’s reflective eyes. Pliny the Elder, in
his Natural History (8,28), regarded the vision of the lynx to be superior to all other animals,calling it “the most clear sighted of all quadrupeds.” (8.28). See Elisabeth Piirainen, “Folk
Narratives and Legends as sources of Widespread Idioms: Toward a Lexicon of Common
Figurative Units,” Folklore 48 (2011): 129.
13. A cat comingling with a monkey, referring to a sinful man who allows himself to be ruled bylust, appears in the central foreground of Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, Fall of Man,signed and dated 1592, oil on panel, 274 x 220 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. No. SKA-129.
14. Other works by Dou with artists’ easels in the background include his Self-Portrait, ca.
© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
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1635–40, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums, Cheltenham, England; Painter with Pipeand Book, 1645, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Self-Portrait, ca. 1645–48, Kremer Collection,
Spain; Self-Portrait, 1647, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,Dresden; Violin Player, 1653, Princely Collections Vaduz Castle, Liechtenstein; Self-Portrait,
1658, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; Self-Portrait, ca. 1665, Van Otterloo Collection, Boston;Self-Portrait, ca. 1665, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Self-Portrait, ca.
1665–67, Musée du Louvre, Paris. See Ronni Baer, Gerrit Dou 1613–1675: Master Painterin the Age of Rembrandt , ed. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (Exh. cat. Washington D.C., National
Gallery of Art; London, Dulwich Picture Gallery; The Hague, Mauritshuis) (Washington D.C.,
2000), 70–71, nos. 7, 14, 16, 20, 29; Walter Liedtke, Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2 vols. (New Haven and London, 2007), 1, no. 37, 158–66; and Frederik J.
Duparc, “Self-Portrait,” in Golden Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marieand Eijk van Otterloo Collection (exh. cat., Salem, MA, Peabody Essex Museum; The
Hague, Mauritshuis) (New Haven and London), 134–35, no. 20. On the uniqueness of ascene of an artist actively painting, see Ronni Baer, “Of Cats and Dogs: Domestic Pets in
Rembrandt and Dou,” in Een Kroniek voor Jeroen Giltaij: Kroniek van he Rembrandthuis(2012): 69, n. 22.
15. Peter Hecht, “Art Beats Nature, and Painting Does so Best of All: The Paragone Competitionin Duquesnoy, Dou and Schalcken,” Simiolus 29 (2002): 184–201.
16. Eric Jan Sluijter, Leidse Fijnschilders: Van Gerrit Dou tot Frans Mieris de Jonge
1640–1760 (Exh. cat. Leiden, Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal) (Zwolle, 1988), 21, no. 9,
98–100; Ronni Baer, The Paintings of Gerrit Dou (1613–1675) , 3 vols. (Ph.D. diss., NewYork University, 1990), no. 44; Eric Jan Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting: On
Paintings by Gerrit Dou and a Treatise by Philips Angel of 1642,” inSeductress of Sight:
Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age (Zwolle, 2000), 198–263, esp. 208–13; Ronni Baer,
Gerrit Dou 1613–1675: Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt , ed. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
(Exh. cat. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; London, Dulwich Picture Gallery; The
Hague, Mauritshuis) (Washington D.C., 2000), 94–95, no. 16; and also Eric Jan Sluijter,“Didactic and Disguised Meanings? Several Seventeenth-Century Texts on Painting and the
Iconological Approach to Northern Dutch Painting of this Period,” Art in History, History in
Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture , ed. David Freedberg and Jan de Vries(Santa Monica, 1991) 175–201.
17. While Dou often included curtains as framing devices in his portraits of the early 1640s (seeGD-116) the device takes on a heightened form of illusion as a trompe l’oeil element with the
Rijksmuseum painting. Dou’s teacher, Rembrandt, similarly exploited the illusionistic effects
of a fictitious curtain in his Holy Family of 1646, now in the Gemäldegalerie in Kassel, while
Dou’s former pupil, Frans van Mieris (1635–81), paid tribute to the classical anecdote in his
painting with Adriaen van der Spelt (1630–73), A Trompe l’oeil with a Garland of Flowers© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
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and a Curtain, dated 1658 and now in the Art Institute of Chicago. See Ben Broos, “A
Trompe-l’Oeil with a Flower Piece and a Curtain,” in Great Dutch Paintings from
America (Exh. cat. The Hague, Mauritshuis; San Francisco, The Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco) (Zwolle, 1990), 408–12; Eric Jan Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting: On
Paintings by Gerrit Dou and a Treatise by Philips Angel of 1642,” inSeductress of Sight:
Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age (Zwolle, 2000) 198–263, esp. 208–13. Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr., “Illusionism in Dutch and Flemish Art,” in Deceptions and Illusions: Five
Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting , ed. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer (Exh. cat. Washington D.C.,
National Gallery of Art) (Washington D.C., 1999), 77–87, and cat. no. 8, 126–27; Quentin
Buvelot, “A Trompe l’Oeil with a Garland of Flowers and a Curtain,” inFrans van Mieris
1635–1681, ed. Quentin Buvelot (Exh. cat. The Hague, Mauritshuis; Washington D.C.,
National Gallery of Art) (New Haven, 2005), 117–19, no. 16; Peter Hecht, “Art Beats Nature,and Painting Does so Best of All: The Paragone Competition in Duquesnoy, Dou andSchalcken,” Simiolus 29 (2002): 184–201, esp. 195–96; and Wayne E. Franits, Dutch
Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution (New Haven andLondon, 2004), 122.
18. Cited in Eric Jan Sluijter, “In Praise of the Art of Painting: On Paintings by Gerrit Dou and a
Treatise by Philips Angel of 1642,” in Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of theGolden Age (Zwolle, 2000), 209, 332, n. 42.
19. The image of a cat watching a mousetrap was well-known in emblematic traditions. It first
appeared in Daniel Heinsius’s popular book of love emblems from 1608, Emblemata
amatoria, where it symbolized the ensnarement of love, with the weary, trapped mouse
representing the lovestruck soul and the cat embodying the lust that ultimately consumes its
prey. Heinsius’s twentieth emblem depicts a mouse inside a wooden trap, too frightened tocome out for fear of the lurking cat who keeps watch beside it, while a mischievous Cupid
with his bow and arrow iterates an underlying theme of love. The accompanying verse
comments on the predicament of the mouse, “Il mal mi preme, et mi spaventa il peggio” (Evilpursues me and fear of worse haunts me), the first line of a love sonnet by Petrarch.
Heinsius’s Dutch poem moralizes the emblem by drawing a parallel between the humanentrapment of love and the ill-fated mouse, whose predicament leads to his demise.
20. Some examples of the subject include three paintings by Adriaen van der Werff(1659–1722): Children with a Cat and Guinea Pig, signed and dated 1681, oil on panel,
33.9 x 27.3 cm., London, Buckingham Palace; Child with a Mouse and Mousetrap , oil on
panel, 19.2 x 13.3 cm., London, The National Gallery; andTwo Children Playing with a Cat
and a Bird in its Jaws , signed and dated 1678, oil on panel, 24.8 x 19 cm, Johnny van
Haeften, London. See also Eglon van der Neer (1634–1703), Children with a Cat and Bird ,oil on panel, 21 x 17 cm., Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe; Willem van Mieris(1662–1747) and Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland (1640–91), Dead Mouse, oil on panel,© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
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signed and dated 1693, 22.7 x 19.6 cm.
21. See the entry on GD-114.
22. I would like to thank Dr. Ute Neidhardt and her research intern Ulrike Müller for providing
copies of Steinhäuser’s unpublished inventory of 1722. The inventory states that GD-108
was delivered by Raschke, who was Prime-Commissar to King Augustus II, and lists
GD-108 as “Ein Cipper Katze” under number “587.” This inventory number corresponds tothe original number that appears at the lower right of the painting in tan-colored paint. See
also Annegret Laabs, The Leiden Fijnschilders from Dresden (Exh. cat. Leiden, Stedelijk
Museum de Lakenhal) (Zwolle, 2000).
23. See Sächsisches Gesetzblatt. Gesetz über die Auseindandersetzung zwischen dem
Freistaate Sachsen und dem vormaligen Köningshause (Dresden, 9 August 1924), no. 37.

Provenance
Art market, Antwerp; [to Raschke, First Commissioner for King Augustus II].
King Augustus II (1670–1733), Royal House Collections, Dresden, by 1722; Collection of theGemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, by 1817; restituted to the House of Wettin, 1924; [P.
Rusch, Dresden, 1927].
Private Collection, Rheinland (sale, Lempertz, Cologne, 20 May 2006, no. 1040 [Johnny van
Haeften, Ltd., London, 2006]).
From whom acquired by the present owner in 2006.

Exhibition History
Oxford, Ashmolean Museum of Art, on loan with the permanent collection, December
2009–January 2011 [lent by the present owner].
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Dutch Treat,” 11 October 2011–6 January 2012[lent by the present owner].
Leiden, Museum de Lakenhal, “Gerrit Dou: The Leiden Collection from New York,” 9March–31 August 2014 [lent by the present owner].
Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, “An Eye For Detail: Dutch
Painting From The Leiden Collection,” September 2014–May 2015 [lent by the present
owner].
© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Cat Crouching on the Ledge of an Artist’s Atelier
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Paris, Museé du Louvre, “Masterpieces of The Leiden Collection: The Age of Rembrandt,”
22 February–22 May 2017 [lent by the present owner].
Beijing, National Museum of China, “Rembrandt and His Time: Masterpieces from The
Leiden Collection,” 17 June–3 September 2017 [lent by the present owner].

References
Hübner, Julius. Verzeichniss der Königlichen Gemälde-Gallerie zu Dresden. Dresden,
1856, 229, no. 1077.
Schäfer, W. Die Könligliche Gemälde-Gallerie zu Dresden zur Erleichterung eingehenderStudien in der Geschickte der Malerei und deren Kunstkritik / Allen Jüngern und Freunden
der Kunst nach der Ordnung der Räume beschreibend und erläuternd vorgefürht und mit
einem resumirenden Verzeichnisse der Maler begleitet . 2 vols. Dresden, 1859, 2:672–73,
no. 1077.
Hübner, Julius. Catalogue de la Galerie Royale de Dresden. Dresden, 1867, 279, no. 1135.
Gower, Lord Ronald. The Figure Painters of Holland. London, 1880, 94.
Hübner, Julius. Catalogue of the Royal Picture Gallery in Dresden . Dresden, 1884, 269, no.
1230.
Woermann, Karl. Catalogue of the Royal Picture Gallery in Dresden . 3rd ed. Dresden, 1896,
185,

no.

1705.

Translated

from Katalog

derKöniglichen

Gemäldegaleriezu

Dresden. Dresden, 1896, 180, no. 1705.
Woermann, Karl. Catalogue of the Royal Picture Gallery in Dresden . 4th ed. Dresden 1899,
185,

no.

1705.

Translated

from Katalog

derKöniglichen

Gemäldegaleriezu

Dresden. Dresden, 1899, 554, no. 1705.
Martin, Wilhelm. Het leven en de werken van Gerrit Dou. Leiden, 1901, 244, no. 362.
Martin, Wilhelm. Gerard Dou. London, 1902, 127, no. 123.
Woermann, Karl. Catalogue of the Royal Picture Gallery in Dresden . 5th ed. Dresden, 1902,
185,

no.

1705.

Translated

from Katalog

derKöninglichen

Gemäldegaleriezu

Dresden. Dresden, 1902, 550, no. 1705.
Woermann, Karl. Catalogue of the Royal Picture Gallery in Dresden . 6th ed. Dresden, 1905,
186, no. 1705.
Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent
Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century Based on the Work of John Smith . 8 vols.
London, 1907–27, 1:461, no. 381. Translated from Beschreibendes und kritisches
Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten Höllandischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts .
© 2017 The Leiden Collection

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10 vols. Esslingen and Paris, 1907–28.
Woermann, Karl. Catalogue of the Royal Picture Gallery at Dresden . 7th ed. Dresden, 1908,
182, no. 1705.
Wurzbach, A. Niederlandisches Kunstler-Lexikon. Vienna and Leipzig, 1910, 418.
Martin, Wilhelm. Gerard Dou, sa vie et son oeuvre: Etude sur la peinture hollandaise et lesmarchaunds au dix septième siècle. Paris, 1911, 197, no. 210.
Woermann, Karl. Catalogue of the Pictures in the Royal Gallery at Dresden . 8th ed.
Dresden, 1912, 181, no. 1705. Translated from Katalog der Königlichen Gemäldegalerie zu
Dresden. Dresden, 1912, 169, no. 1705.
Martin, Wilhelm. Gerard Dou, des Meisters Gemälde. Klassiker der Kunst. Stuttgart andBerlin, 1913, 143.
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1705.
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Sachsen und dem vormaligen Köningshause. Dresden, 9 August 1924, no. 37.
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University, 1990, Appendix A: Untraced Works of Undetermined Attribution.
Laabs, Annegret. The Leiden Fijnschilders from Dresden . Exh. cat. Leiden, Stedelijk
Museum de Lakenhal. Zwolle, 2000, 127.
Kuretsky, Susan Donahue. “Rembrandt’s Cat.” In Aemulatio: Imitation, Emulation andInvention in Netherlandish Art from 1500 to 1800; Essays in Honor of Eric Jan Sluijter .
Zwolle, 2011, 263–76.
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voor Jeroen Giltaij: Kroniek van he Rembrandthuis (2012): 62–69.
Surh, Dominique, Van Tuinen, Ilona and Twilley, John. “Insights from Technical Analysis on
a Group of Paintings by Gerrit Dou in the Leiden Collection.” Journal of Historians ofNetherlandish Art 6, no. 1 (Winter, 2014): 2–4, 12, 21, 24–26, figs. 7a–b, 56, 68a–b, 71a–b,
72 a–b.

Technical Summary
The support is a vertically grained panel made from a single oak plank of Baltic origin. The woodcomes from a tree felled after 1588.[1] The panel is beveled only on the right edge, as viewed
from reverse. There are four overlapping circles inscribed in the reverse of the panel in the lower
quarter. The center of each is marked with a compass point. According to Ian Tyers’© 2017 The Leiden CollectionPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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Dendochronological report, the presence of these “partial ‘daisy-wheel’ apotropaeic mark[s]scratched on the back of the board…both strongly suggests that it has been cut down, and alsothat it is a re-used board, possibly originating from room paneling.”[2]The panel was prepared with a light colored ground. It is radio-opaque, indicating it contains a
dense pigment such as lead white, and it accentuates the wood grain in the X-radiograph. The
paint was built up in thin layers of light over dark. Infrared reflectography [3] and the x-radiographshow numerous compositional changes, which may be indicative of an entirely different
composition. Originally a young woman was depicted leaning forward in the lower right corner ofthe painting. Her proper right arm was bent as if she was pouring something. Just below thisfigure was a rectangular shape that may have been a mousetrap. In addition, there was a curtain
on the left side of the composition and a round shape, which may have been a globe, can beseen vertically centered on the left. Also, the arch of the niche was originally taller and broader,extending beyond the edge of the panel on the top and the right. This is further indication that thepanel was originally larger.
The painting is in good condition. There are drying cracks in the dark brown shadows and there
are a few areas of slightly raised paint. There are small protrusions and related craters
throughout the paint. The painting was treated in 2006.

Technical Summary Endnotes

1. Ian Tyers, Dendochronological report November 2010.
2. Ian Tyers, Dendochronological report November 2010.
3. Infrared reflectography at 1500 – 1680 microns was performed by Shawn Digney-Peerusing an InGaAs camera with a bandpass filter.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection