Minneapolis Institute of Art
The Cat's Paw
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer
- Date
- c. 1824
- Medium
- Oil on panel
- Department
- European Art
- Institution
- Minneapolis Institute of Art
In Jean de La Fontaine's seventeenth-century fable, which this painting illustrates, a cunning monkey persuades a cat to retrieve roasting chestnuts from a fire. The term cat's paw, meaning a person unwittingly duped by another, derives from this tale. Numerous engraved and painted precedents for the brutality of Landseer's interpretation existed in the work of seventeenth-century Dutch and British illustrators of La Fontaine. The fabulist's symbolic use of animals to describe the tribulations of human existence became popular among nineteenth-century romantic painters and satirists. England, Europe
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