The Cat at Play

A kitten has got up onto a table and is batting at a set of dominoes, and right beside it sits an ashtray with a cigar still burning. That is the whole joke, and the whole tension. One careless swipe and the cigar goes over. Ronner-Knip painted scenes like this in Brussels for buyers who had started to treat cats as members of the household, and she set them among the ordinary clutter of a 19th-century interior, here the props of an evening of smoking and games. The panel is small, about 33 by 45 centimetres, and signed at the top right. The Rijksmuseum can date it only broadly, between about 1860 and 1878. It came to the museum in 1907 with the bequest of the Haarlem collector J.B.A.M. Westerwoudt.