Well, here we are on the shortest day of the year (or longest, if you are my Australian friends) and it always feels a bit like a turning point in the year. I am cooking a Christmas dinner for Grampy Stonell today and so this will be a busy dark day for us, then the days will start stretching out towards the Spring.
The Fluffle Triplets were just saying what everyone else was thinking...
I am filled with glee by today's offering as it is a cat being a proper little sod. This isn't messing with your wool, this is wholescale vandalism...
Witness My Act and Deed (1881) Frank Paton
Look at the little ratbag! He regrets nothing! In some sort of legal office (I can see the top of a conveyancing document, and I think the unfortunate document having ink splashed all over it might be a will or deed to some property) the office cat has decided to get involved. The double meaning of the title - to witness a document by signing it, or we are witnessing the little cat's act and deed in toppling an ink pot - is typical of Paton's work. He seems to have used comic situations and cute cats, and it made his fortune.
The Fairest One of All
Like some of the other artists we've met this month, Frank Paton appears to have used his own pets as models. The family of tabby cats that crop up repeatedly in his work can be seen in both allegorical and literal pieces, such as A Proud Mother which is arguably the wellspring for all the kittens that are up to japes in his other works.
A Proud Mother
(Or Kittens of Destruction: The Origin Story)
So, we can see the little kitten being washed by her mother is probably the same one as in The Fairest One of All. Either of the all-tabby kittens behind her could be the wrecker of legal documents.
Kittens Playing Around a Saddle
What I am finding very interesting is that Paton's work isn't in the newspapers as much as I was expecting, given its commercial, charming nature. There are quite a few recent articles on him (by recent I mean from 1960 onwards, it's all relative) including a mention of The Fairest One of All when it was up for auction in 1996. It was included in an art section of the Whiskas stand at the Centenary National Cat Show with a piece by Louis Wain (for those who don't know Whiskas is a leading brand of cat food in the UK) (It is said to sound like 'Whiskers' but I've never thought about the way it is spelt) (I digress). Even more interestingly, when The Fairest One of All sold at auction in 1988 it reached £28,000 (which astonished Country Life who wrote a short piece about how unexpectedly popular he suddenly was) but by the 1996 cat show, the auction price expected was only £10-15K which indicates to me that maybe the Frank Paton bubble had popped by that point. However, Mr Paton was a commercial genius and didn't need the applause of the art critic press...
A Frank Paton Christmas Card
As Paton was so good at humorous sketches of animals, he teamed up with art dealer Edward Ernest Leggatt to produce etched Christmas Cards, beginning in 1880 and continuing until his death in 1909. Each one contained a central scene of animals doing funny, usually seasonally appropriate things, and the border would be little, rougher sketches on the same theme. When Paton fell out with the organisers of the annual Royal Academy exhibition, he quit the establishment path because he didn't need it anymore. His fame was such that people flocked to buy his accessible pieces for half a guinea each. There were so many produced that you can easily buy them still on places like eBay.
I was pleased to find Paton's image of a cat being actively naughty in such a destructive way. We are lucky that our cat is not a smasher/pusher/spiller and merely a menacer of wool. I think TikTok is built on videos of cats breaking things in a careless and arguably malicious manner to comic effect and so Paton's little legal saboteur would fit right in. I wonder if the image was inspired by a true event? It reminds me of this...
Somewhere, in the 15th century, a cat was waiting to mess things up for a monk. It is proof enough that cats think everything we do is less important than feeding them. To be honest, half the time they are probably not wrong.
See you tomorrow.