Carl Kahler
1856–1906 · Austria–Hungary · Academic art, Realism, Genre painting
The story
In 1891 a wealthy San Francisco widow, Kate Birdsall Johnson, hired a visiting Austrian painter to portray her cats. Carl Kahler delivered a canvas about 2.6 metres wide with 42 of her Persian and Angora cats in it, each one painted as an individual. Its title, My Wife's Lovers, is thought to come from a joke by her late husband, Robert Johnson, who had died two years earlier.
Kahler reached that commission by a long route. Born in Linz, he trained at the Munich Academy, then spent five years in Melbourne from 1885, painting portraits and crowded race-day scenes of the Melbourne Cup at Flemington, filled with recognisable faces from local society. He left Australia in 1890 and settled in San Francisco the following year.
The cat picture made his name and ended up as his whole reputation, overshadowing the portraits and genre scenes of his academic training. Kahler died in San Francisco on 18 April 1906, the day of the great earthquake. His giant canvas survived the disaster, and in 2015 it sold at Sotheby's in New York for 826,000 dollars.
