Artist:
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Sir Edwin Henry Landseer
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Title:
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The Cat's Paw
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Date:
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c. 1824
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Medium:
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Oil on panel
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Dimensions:
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30 x 27 1/8 in. (76.2 x 68.9 cm) (sight)
37 7/8 x 35 1/8 x 2 1/4 in. (96.2 x 89.22 x 5.72 cm) (outer frame)
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Credit Line:
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Gift of Dr. Roger L. Anderson in memory of Agnes Lynch Anderson
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Location:
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Gallery 321
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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.
Artist/Creator(s)
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Name:
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Landseer, Sir Edwin Henry
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Nationality:
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British
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Life Dates:
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British, 1802 - 1873
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Object Description
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Inscriptions:
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Classification:
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Paintings
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Creation Place:
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Europe, England, , ,
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Accession #:
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82.47
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Owner:
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The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
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