Today is the anniversary of one of the most famous cats of all: Schrodinger’s Cat. It is eighty-three years since Erwin Schrodinger first published his thought problem about whether a hypothetical cat in a box was dead or alive. To celebrate this we turn to one of the greatest cat painters of all time: Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, who turned the still life from a staid mode past its zenith to something bristling with emotion.
Chardin sometimes did this by placing a living element—cats, for instance—amongst his pigeons, partridges and oysters to harry their sense of stillness. In his works, the cat treads through and over the academic propriety of objects this dead artist has laid out for his study. (Who isn’t familiar, today, with a cat walking over the keys of their computer?) The fluffy, mischievous presence of it upsets and also creates the balance of this masterpiece.
