room:"G305"
The Cat's Paw
Portrait of George Washington
View of the Colosseum from the Orti Farnesiani
Louis Philippe (1773–1850), King of France, and his Sons, the Duke of Chartres and the Duke of Nemours
The Choir in the Capuchin Church on the Piazza Barberini, Rome
Portrait of Dr. Thomas Penrose
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Oil on panelexpand_more
Gift of Dr. Roger L. Anderson in memory of Agnes Lynch Andersonexpand_more 82.47
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.