From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
The way we treat animals: we like looking at them but we also like eating them (maybe lions feel the same way about us). In our needless hunting of whales, elephants, sharks, badgers and foxes, our bear-baiting, bullfighting, horse racing, dog racing, vivisection and factory farming or, say, the self-sabotaging annihilation of beavers accomplished by the Canadian fur trade, capitalism and sadism nimbly merge. Meanwhile, how much fun do animals get out of serving as pets? In return for reliable meal times, they’re doomed to boredom, obedience, confinement and sexual abstinence, their days spent pointlessly trying to understand us.
One of our species’ happier traits is that some of us can paint, and occasionally we’re even funny. The exactitude of American artist De Scott Evans’s tongue-in-cheek portrait of an imprisoned cat matches the style he used in many playful trompe l’oeil still lifes. He liked to paint apples, pears or potatoes hanging on strings, but it’s his life-size offerings of almonds or peanuts that are most endearing. In one painting, casually held in place between a cracked pane of dusty glass and the back of a beat-up old picture frame, a handful of nuts entreats the passerby. These neighbourly freebies are so realistic, the temptation is great to obey the little note, written in a refined hand and tucked under the edge of the fictitious glass: ‘A New Variety Try One’. It looks like something you might have found a hundred years ago, nailed to a post outside a large Midwestern house. It’s always nice to be offered free stuff.
A New Variety, Try One (1887–90), De Scott Evans. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Homage to a Parrot (c. 1890) uses the same wooden frame with its broken pane, but this time a handsome stuffed parrot is suspended behind the glass. Evans was a diligent copier of his own work. Even the black-and-white cat, stuck here in such a parlous position, appears elsewhere fully at liberty: in a painting called The Artist and her Model (1891), a girl sketches the self-same cat in an identical pose, patiently sitting on a table. Same animal, totally different emotional range. To make a living, Evans supplied the public with sub-Fragonard beauties, hazy pictures of well-dressed young women in idyllic domestic or rural surroundings – of no interest now except perhaps to fashion historians. His trompe l’oeils were done on the side, probably to remain sane.
The free-nut paintings aren’t just practical jokes though. Sly emissaries from a sweeter world, they have a nostalgic, even melancholy air. The cat picture is not cute either. Rather, it’s all too believable. Innocent, forlorn, manhandled, the prisoner eyes us warily. Both eyes are visible, but it’s the right one that we see best through the bars, and its expression is accusatory and hints at human culpability. Cats can do that. The fur is so soft, the crate so crude. It’s an image of dignity affronted, nature in chains, a once-proud animal debased. Why has he, or let’s say she (given that feline and female are often elided), found herself in this pinch – is it a game, a punishment, or perhaps merely a practical measure necessitated by travel? How long has she been in there? Long enough to get settled, evidently, with her paws placed carefully together in front of her. But she’s not comfortable. The crate is cramped. She’s offended, maybe traumatised. After all, how did they ever get her in there? Someone must have deafeningly nailed the final slats to the front of the crate while holding her down.
Cat in a Crate (c. 1887), De Scott Evans. Private Collection. Photo: Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images
Today’s dog owners claim their dogs love their dog crates. And cats voluntarily jump into boxes, in play. But no cat likes to be cornered. As an image of victimhood, Cat in a Crate beats many a crucifixion. It also prefigures Evans’s very sad end. On their way to Paris in 1898, he and his three daughters had the ill luck to take La Bourgogne, a passenger steamer acclaimed for its speed (it could cross the Atlantic in a week). Racing along at night despite thick fog, the ship collided with another vessel off Newfoundland and went down in minutes. But that wasn’t the worst of it. According to survivors, members of the crew resorted to murder in order to keep the lifeboats for themselves. They stabbed, beat and intentionally drowned struggling passengers. More than 500 people died and, of the 300 women on board, only one survived. It’s terrible to think that Evans, kindly idealist and master prankster, may have witnessed some of this horror. His incarcerated cat becomes a memento mori of the helplessness that awaits us all.
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.