Susan Herbert. Photo: courtesy of the artist/ Thames & Hudson “The smallest feline is a masterpiece,” wrote Leonardo da Vinci, whose drawing Study of Cat Movements and Positions testifies to his admiration for the animal’s flexibility; Thomas Gainsborough‘s and Paul Gauguin‘s cat studies were very similar to da Vinci’s. Cats have proliferated in art over the centuries. They became particularly popular as the cuddly familiars of females in paintings by Victorian artists and French Impressionists. The cat painted by Edouard Manet in the lap of his eight-year-old niece Julie (the daughter of Berthe Morisot, herself a future artist) in 1887 may be the most content in art history. Less reassuring is the black cat—symbol of prostitution—perched on the end of the naked woman’s bed in Manet’s Olympia , which scandalized Paris when it was shown at the 1865 Salon. As the art and literature scholar Bram Dijkstra has observed, cats and ...