In Famous Artists' Cats, we've seen Degas invaded before. After admiring the stretching exercises of Degas' dancers, Punky decided to join them in Ballet Class Visitor. But Punky was an observer who didn't interfere. What happened later was more, let's say, interactive.

Edgar Degas was a loner, an increasingly irritating crank who spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, wandering around Paris by himself, not creating any new paintings or sculptures in his last five years. Unlike impressionists Monet and Renoir, alongside whom he rose to fame, he refused to paint outdoors or spontaneously, and he mocked those who did. He was a fish out of water among the rebels who abandoned the Paris Salons to organize their own shows in the 1870s and 80s. When the group broke up, it was largely because everyone else tired of arguing with Degas. 

"What a creature he was!" declared the mild mannered Renoir, one the last friends to abandon him.

His story comes off as odd for an artist of such beauty and warmth. He believed that an artist should not have a personal life. It is not known whether Sam, the cat inspired by Degas' Millinery Shop felt sorry for him or agreed. Maybe he was persuaded by the occasional bowl of water and table scraps. 

Art historians may argue that Sam was a cat who lived in the shop, keep it safe from rodents and happy to have a job in which he was welcome to snooze all day and patrol at night. All we have are guesses really, since everyone who was there has now passed away. Study the picture yourself and see what you think.

We know this. Degas was best known for his paintings of ballerinas and realistic nudes based on photographs, but he also contributed a number of pictures of daily life in Paris. He started The Millinery Shop in 1879 and finally considered it done five years later. Sam starred at it many times, appreciating how the colors shifted between brown and green as a young woman tried on hats. He was especially taken with the wide viridescent ribbon flowing off one.

As he felt the magnetism swelling in him, the woman replaced the hat on its hanger and reached for another without ribbons, and his will shredded, he did what any self-respecting cat would do. He pounced, giving us the picture we have today:

Cat In Degas' Hat Shop by Deborah Julian

Cat In Degas' Hat Shop, inspired by The Millinery Shop, can also be found on a cat card, a refrigerator magnet and a decorative wooden box.

Deborah Julian began her Famous Artists Cats cat art series with a sentimental adaptation of one of Edgar Degas' beautiful pictures of ballet dancers. A founding, although somewhat reluctant member of the impressionist blossoming in France, Degas (1834 to 1917) was famous for his paintings of dancers. The majority of his work in all mediums was concerned with the dance. 

Throughout the 1870s, Degas exhibited with a radical group that put up shows outside the conservative mainstream. Many of those that eventually made him most famous were of and about dancers. A century and a half later, it's hard to appreciate how innovative the impressionists works were, many of them undercutting accepted ideas about color and perspective. The subjects, too, suggesting modern life changing in France, with woman emerging into public occupations, were a departure from the respected themes that dominated the salons.

With her degrees in photography and art history informing her career, Deborah Julian thought of herself as a fine art and street photographer. Her first effort in cat art, Ballet Class Visitor (After Degas), brilliant though it is in retrospect, was created as a gift for a young dancer friend.

Julian took a Degas painting she loved of a ballet class with a pair of Parisian dancers going through their stretches at the bar. The toneof painting is golden, almost a fantasy of dream image, a quality not unlike other impressionist images of the time. To re-imagine this beautiful image of cat art, she needed only a golden cat to fit the image.

She found Punky, a little tiger who has brought a ribbon to the scene, hoping someone might play with them when the work is done. Cats, of course, are masters of the stretch, and Punky expresses this with nonchalance toward the ballet dancers strenuous efforts.

The marriage of cat art and French impressionism was an immediate success and set the stage for future brilliant pictures in the series, including Matisse Goldfish and Bathers (After Bonnard.)

An article featuring Simon Tofield (Simon's Cat), Deborah Julian, and James Dean (Pete The Cat): Funny Cat Pics

Her Famous Artist Cats cat art series is growing in both images and popularity. Future articles here will feature some of Deborah Julian's newest work.

 Artists' cats, famous and not so famous, have been the theme for Deborah Julian's popular series Famous Artists' Cats. Most have been inspired by impressionist painters, colorists like Matisse and Van Gogh, which made seeing her newest image, based on René Magritte's Invisible World, a pleasant surprise.

(See Cat Art Innovations)

Magritte was a surrealist and very much a Twentieth Century man. I like to think of him as the civilized version of Salvatore Dali who went at his work with a bluntness that sometimes verged on crude. Magritte's painting are more smooth and subtle, taking viewers intoworlds that don't exist. 

Yves Tanguy and Joan Miro, although equally refined and wise, painted dream worlds full of fantasy and imagined structures. Magritte stood out because his paintings, equally beautiful, presented an imaginary world of symbols and objects that looked like they could be real, but weren't. Bowler hats suggested a formal world, but weren't necessarily on heads. All seeing eyes appeared as detached features in a landscape. In Invisible World, he created a stark, minimalist reality that lives beneath of within the one we see.

Into this surreal environment enters the first living thing. Deborah Julian's Invisible Cat has wandered into the scene, unaware, it seems, that it's supposed to be imaginary. 

Having wandered into René Magritte's imagination, the cat has decided to relax and enjoy the quiet. He's parked himself behind the painter's inexplicable boulder. The dark clouds that lurk in the background are of no interest to this in the moment animal. Right now, he is appreciating his new vista in which only he knows the contents. 

Maybe the Invisible Cat is just looking at us, happy that we can't really see him. 

Famous Artists' Cats: Paul Cézanne's Apple Basket With Cats

Recognizing the penetrating genius of a subject who's work inspires famous artists' cats, legendary painters Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso both called post impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) "the father of us all." This can only be understood if your idea of "father" is rude, disagreeable, generally impossible to get along with and rich enough or genius enough to get away with it.  

Fortunately for Cézanne, he was both. 

Ironically, Cézanne felt the same way about a painter of whom he considered himself a student but one who'd rarely be considered in the same league. About Camille Pissarro, he said, "We all stem from Pissarro."

What Matisse, Picasso and many others admired were Cézanne's skills as a painter, not as a parent or Dutch Uncle. He is recognized as the pioneer who lifted art out of impressionism and into modernism. He inspired Picasso's cubism as well as Matisse's fauvism. Many consider him the painter who launched expressionism, but only Pissarro's sunny influence lifted him out his darker creative efforts into pictures more sunny, even if scorned by contemporary critics.

"Fauves," interpreted literally, means "wild beasts, and Cézanne was the daddy of wild beasts. He was also incredibly bold and inventive as a painter, contributing art both shocking in it's time and original always.