What happened to Claude Monet’s cat?
Artists and cats are a perfect combination. So much so, Impressionist painter Claude Monet was once given a porcelain cat, which was made in Japan, as a gift. Then it disappeared for several decades. After a recent discovery, the glazed cat makes headlines and a tidy profit from Christie’s recent auction in Hong Kong.
Claude Monet’s terra cotta cat comes home
Martin Baile, from Art Newspaper, says the cat is back at Monet’s house in Giverny, northern France, due to an unknown family member
Self portrait with Beret, 1886
Claude Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926) was born in Paris. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (1872). One of his most famous paintings is Water LIllies, (194-1926) which hangs at The Musuem of Modern Art in New York City.
Water Lillies
Painted 1914-1926 by Monet
According to Smithsonian magazineThe American socialite Pauline Howard-Johnson visited Monet’s house in 1924. She remembers seeing the cat on a couch in the bright yellow dining room
“On a pillow, a white cat—sort of unpolished terracotta—sleeping snugly,” she said.
Monet’s cat back in his house in Giverny. Photo: Martin Bailey
Later, she saw it in the home of Michel, Monet’s second son, who was killed in a car crash in 1966. That’s when the glazed biscuit cat disappeared.
In 2011, Adrien Meyer, co-chair of the Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s, was invited to a private home. During his visit he noticed unframed Monet paintings stored under beds, Monet’s eyeglasses and other items in cardboard boxes, and the terra-cotta cat he said “was very casually sitting on the piano.”
Michel was married but didn’t have children. He left his vast collection of family artifacts and paintings to France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts and its Marmottan Monet Museum, although some paintings and items from his collection appeared to be missing reported Mark Brown at The Guardian. Turns out Michel had an illegitimate daughter that no one, including Monet experts, knew about. Her name was Rolande Verneiges (born 1914-2008). She inherited the missing portion of Michel’s collection.
Sometime after Ms. Verneiges death, her heirs contacted Mr. Meyer because they decided to auction the paintings and artifacts.
The cat was estimated to sell for about $3000-$4000. It went for $67,0000, purchased by the Japanese art and coin dealer Hideyuki Wada. He donated it to the Fondation Claude Monet, which runs Monet’s house in Giverny in northern France.
The cat is now back in Monet’s dining room, napping comfortably on a cushion.
Hanging above the cat is a facsimile of one of the Japanese prints acquired by Monet, Utagawa Hiroshige’s dramatic depiction of a swooping eagle.
