Poaching Cat

In 1910 Niestlé moved to Sindelsdorf, a village in the Bavarian foothills where his friend Franz Marc lived, and brought his companion Marguerite Legros with him. They took rooms on the first floor of the village bakery, and he set up his studio under the roof. This canvas carries that year in its signature at the lower right, J.B. NIESTLÉ 10. The German title calls the cat wildernd, the word for poaching, used here for an animal out hunting game that is not its own. The canvas is nearly square, about half a metre each way. Like his two other pictures in the Lenbachhaus, it came to the museum in 1965 as a gift of the Bernhard and Elly Koehler Foundation, named after a family of Berlin collectors who had backed the Blue Rider painters.