Cats and Fish

By 1781 a cat raiding the kitchen table was an old theme in painting. Flemish painters such as Frans Snyders had slipped thieving cats into their larder scenes a century and a half earlier, and in 1728 the Parisian painter Jean-Siméon Chardin had placed a young cat, fur on end, among the oysters in his still life of a skate. Martin Ferdinand Quadal, a Moravian painter best known for animals, takes up the subject here. A calico cat stands on the table and lowers its nose toward a row of striped mackerel laid out on cabbage leaves. Behind them a tabby kitten has hooked its paws over the rim of a big dark cooking pot and watches with wide eyes. In the lower right corner he signed and dated the canvas, M. F. Quadal fet., short for fecit, he made it, 1781.