Henriette Ronner-Knip’s Cat Paintings

Her father’s rigorous training paid off and by the time she was 16 she was producing paintings to sell at a fast pace, and she was taking part in some notable exhibitions, such as the Exhibition of Living Masters in the Netherlands in 1838. Her paintings were usually of countryside landscapes, farms, castles and still-lifes, but she was starting to paint more scenes of animals. She especially liked to paint cats and dogs.

In 1850 Henriette married Feico Ronner, who due to ill-health was unable to work and became her manager. They settled in Brussels and had six children. It was in their new home, which also had a large garden and room for plenty of pets, that Henriette began to focus solely on painting cats and dogs. Her later works feature mother cats with her kittens, cats playing or hunting, and even some examining her paints and brushes. While she often painted cats that she owned, she would observe their behaviour and then use paper models set up in poses when it came to producing her paintings.

The paintings held by Hartlepool were produced between 1895 and 1902. They are all titled ‘Cat Study’, and a study is a word often used by artists to describe the first copy of a painting or an experimentation of how to paint something. Some studies include little attention to the background of a painting and instead focus on capturing the details and features of the painting’s subject. Her cats all show recognisable behaviour, such as how they sit, look about and the way they sleep against each other, and her painting style emphasises the softness of their fur.

Henriette Ronner-Knip was very popular in her time, especially with the pet-owning bourgeois classes of Europe. Like her father before her she was hired by royalty to paint their pets, including the lapdogs of Marie Henriette of Austria, Queen of the Belgians. She also won many awards for her art and became a member of artist societies and academies. Just before her death in 1909, she was admitted into the Order of Orange-Nassau in the Netherlands, an Order open to “everyone who has performed acts of special merits for society”.