Die Lieblinge meiner Frau

The title is a joke made by a very rich husband. In 1891 the San Francisco philanthropist Kate Birdsall Johnson kept dozens of Persian and Angora cats, and her spouse liked to call them her lovers. She hired the Austrian painter Carl Kahler, newly arrived from Australia, to put 42 of them on one enormous canvas, roughly six by eight and a half feet. Kahler had never painted a cat in his life. He spent about three years sketching the animals one by one to learn their faces and their moods. At the center sits Sultan, the prize of the collection, bought in Paris for a small fortune. The picture survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and it still holds the odd distinction of being the largest cat painting anyone has made.