"Le chat" or The Cat at the Window

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Artist: Jean-François Millet (French, 1814–1875)
Medium: Conté crayon and pastel with stumping and blending, fixed, on wove paper
Size: 49.8 × 39.4 cm (19 5/8 × 15 1/2 in.)
Culture: French
Museum: J. Paul Getty Museum
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Moonlight shines through an open window, illuminating a bedroom. A black cat with glowing eyes enters and looks toward a startled man who pokes his head through the bed curtains. His shoes lie on the floor in front of the bed, and his clothes are on a chair where he left them.

This drawing illustrates "The Cat Who Became a Woman," a fable by the seventeenth-century French writer Jean de La Fontaine. According to the story, a man becomes infatuated with his cat and convinces Destiny to change her into a woman. He marries her, but on their first night together she springs from the marriage bed to chase a mouse across the bedroom floor. The fable's moral is "The truth will out": no matter how much one's outward appearance changes, one's essential character remains.

In a wealth of tones hidden in deep shadows, Jean-François Millet evoked the story's haunting mystery.

Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.