Dog and Cats

In 1896 a Greek jurist, Alexandros Soutzos, left his collection and his estate to the state so that Athens could have an art museum. It opened in 1900, and this French canvas arrived with that bequest, 80 by 100 centimetres, catalogued as Dog and Cats under the number P.180. Desportes made his career in Paris, under Louis XIV and then Louis XV, in the decades when French painting began to treat animals as a subject worth a large canvas of their own. A dog meeting cats head on is one of those subjects. The gallery's record carries no date for it, only the painter's years, 1661 to 1743.