With his portraitist’s eye, which leaves nothing to chance, Philippe Smit paints his cat with a fixed, mysteriously luminous gaze, in a hieratic pose, its front paws joined and enclosed by its tail. Deprived of any natural setting, the animal is depicted life-size against the blue ground of a Balinese fabric with a golden border; the frontality of the image and the solemnity of the attitude may, to the contemporary viewer, evoke certain representations of cats in ancient Egyptian art. It nevertheless seems that the artist was primarily concerned with conveying the presence and psychology of the feline rather than emphasizing a symbolic dimension.
This cat answered to the Dutch first name Klaas, derived from Nikolaas, to which the suffix "je" adds an affectionate diminutive.
René Massé, a friend of the artist, reported in December 1931 the presence of this "gorgeous black-striped cat, which is one year old" 1 in the studio at Thoury-Ferrottes2. This is the only known observation of this pet.
Apart from a few occasional and anecdotal representations of real or fantasized creatures, the genre of animal art does not occupy a place in Smit's work. We can consider that the choice to represent Klaasje as the sole subject of this painting was only dictated by the great affection and fascination that the animal exerted on the artist.
1. Massé 1920-1935, 13 December 1931, p. [18].
2. See [PS 323].