Woman with a Cat

This canvas has two titles, and they put different characters at its centre. The Musée d'Orsay lists it as The Woman with a Cat, or The Demanding Cat. The woman is Marthe, Bonnard's companion, at a table laid for a meal, and the demanding one is the white cat that has climbed up among the dishes.

Bonnard painted it around 1912 on an almost square canvas, about 78 centimetres each way. In 1965 Baroness Eva Gebhard-Gourgaud gave it to the national museum of modern art in Paris, and in 1977 it was assigned to the collection of the future Musée d'Orsay.