Woman with a Cat

Woman with a Cat (Femme au chat) is a small oil on canvas painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, dated to about 1875 and signed 'Renoir.' at lower left; it has been in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., since 1950.

The picture belongs to the mid-1870s, the only period in which Renoir took part in the Impressionist group exhibitions, in 1874, 1876 and 1877. The museum gives no name for the sitter. She is seen half-length, seated in a red armchair against a greenish wall and a flowered hanging, wearing a white short-sleeved bodice of the kind worn over a corset. She clasps a grey tabby to her chest and bends her face down towards it; on one hand she wears a ring set with a green stone. The brushwork is soft and the outlines are blurred, yet the drawing of the faces of both woman and cat is attentive and individual.

The painting's first recorded owner was Ernest Hoschedé, the Paris department-store director and collector who was one of the early patrons of Claude Monet and the Impressionists. Hoschedé went bankrupt in 1877, and his collection was auctioned in June 1878, for a fraction of its value. Woman with a Cat was lot 75 in that sale of 6 June 1878 and was bought by Count de Rasty of Paris.

The Countess de Rasty sold it in 1925 or 1926 to the dealer Paul Rosenberg, and by 1932 it belonged to Benjamin E. Levy, who lived in Paris and in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin E. Levy gave the painting to the National Gallery of Art in 1950. It measures 56 × 46.4 cm.