The Cat's Paw . Edwin Henry Landseer
In
Jean de La Fontaine's seventeenth-century fable, which this painting
illustrates, a cunning monkey persuades a cat to retrieve roasting
chestnuts from a fire. The term "cat's paw," meaning a person
unwittingly duped by another, derives from this tale.
Numerous
engraved and painted precedents for the brutality of Landseer's
interpretation existed in the work of seventeenth-century Dutch and
British illustrators of La Fontaine. The fabulist's symbolic use of
animals to describe the tribulations of human existence became popular
among nineteenth-century romantic painters and satirists.
circa 1824
Oil on panel
30 × 27.125 in (76.2 × 68.9 cm)
Minneapolis Institute of Arts , Minneapolis, Minnesota
Accession number 82.47
Credit line Gift of Dr. Roger L. Anderson in memory of Agnes Lynch Anderson
See also : Animals, Paintings, Drawings
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