Etude de chat (Raminou)

The words "Mon Raminou", my Raminou, are painted on this small panel together with Suzanne Valadon's signature, and they name the sleeper. Raminou was her own cat, and he lived with her in the studio on the rue Cortot in Montmartre. A photograph taken there shows her with him on her lap, his head raised towards her.

She made this study around 1917, in oil straight onto a piece of plywood 38 centimetres high, and left much of the bare wood showing around the sleeping cat. She painted Raminou again in the early 1920s. The panel belonged to her friend, the doctor and collector Robert Le Masle, who left it to the Centre Pompidou in 1974, and since 1975 the Pompidou has kept it on deposit at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brest.