Henriëtte Ronner-Knip didn’t position her cats to paint them. She let them live.
In her Brussels studio she had a cage built with an entire glass front, and inside it her cats slept, stretched, fought, and got bored like any cat in any home. She waited for hours until she found the exact posture she was looking for, captured it in sketches on paper, and only then began to paint. That was how she created paintings such as ‘Study of Eleven Cats,’ from 1904, in which no animal repeats a position on the same canvas.
That level of obsession brought her something unusual for a woman in the 19th century: commissions from the queens of Belgium and Portugal, and in 1887 the Cross of the Order of Leopold II. She was also the first woman admitted as an active member of the society of artists in Amsterdam. And even with those honors, the critics of her time summed her up in one word: decorative. She never stopped looking through the glass.
