Getty Museum

"Le chat" or The Cat at the Window

Date

about 1857–1858

Medium

Conté crayon and pastel with stumping and blending, fixed, on wove paper

Culture

French

Department

Drawings

Institution

Getty Museum

Moonlight shines through an open window, illuminating a bedroom. A black cat with glowing eyes enters and looks toward a startled man who pokes his head through the bed curtains. His shoes lie on the floor in front of the bed, and his clothes are on a chair where he left them. This drawing illustrates "The Cat Who Became a Woman," a fable by the seventeenth-century French writer Jean de La Fontaine. According to the story, a man becomes infatuated with his cat and convinces Destiny to change her into a woman. He marries her, but on their first night together she springs from the marriage bed to chase a mouse across the bedroom floor. The fable's moral is "The truth will out": no matter how much one's outward appearance changes, one's essential character remains. In a wealth of tones hidden in deep shadows, Jean-François Millet evoked the story's haunting mystery.

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