Henriëtte Ronner: Cat with Kittens, 1844 – Porcelain Art Mug

A mother cat tends to her kittens with the concentrated absorption of an animal that has forgotten it is being watched. The small figures tumble and press close in the warm, even light of a Dutch interior. Henriëtte Ronner was twenty-three when she painted it in 1844; the panel is in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Ronner (1821–1909) was born in Amsterdam to a family of painters and began exhibiting professionally while still a teenager, initially concentrating on landscapes and animal subjects in the tradition of Dutch naturalism. By the 1860s she had settled in Brussels and shifted her attention almost exclusively to cats — a subject she would make entirely her own. She built a specially designed glass-fronted studio that allowed her to observe her feline subjects at close quarters while they went about their lives. The resulting paintings combine the meticulous observation of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters with the Victorian taste for the domestic scene. Cat with Kittens is an early work, already showing the attention to feline behaviour that would characterise her mature practice: a painting about watchfulness — the mother's and the painter's — executed with the patient precision that sustained a career across seven decades.

Fine porcelain, 10 oz — 104 mm high, 75 mm across the base. The image runs around the body; handle and rim stay white. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Henriëtte Ronner, Cat with Kittens, 1844, oil on panel. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.