Two Cats

Steinlen painted and drew cats with a consistency that no other major artist of the Belle Époque matched; by the early 1890s, when this work was produced, he had already become the defining visual voice of Montmartre's street life and cabaret culture through his collaboration with Aristide Bruant and his celebrated posters for the Chat Noir cabaret. Two Cats was created during a period when Steinlen was at the height of his commercial and fine-art productivity, moving fluidly between poster art, illustration for publications such as Gil Blas illustré, and smaller independent works that revealed his naturalist sympathies. His treatment of animals drew from the realist tradition established by Courbet and refined through the Post-Impressionist sensibility of the 1880s and 90s; he observed cats not as decorative symbols but as creatures with weight, posture, and behavioral specificity. The pairing of the calico and the black cat in this composition is not merely aesthetic: it reflects Steinlen's interest in the full social and tonal range of feline life as he encountered it daily in his Montmartre studio and the surrounding streets. The work has been held in European private and institutional collections and reproduced frequently as an example of Steinlen's capacity to work at intimate scale with the same authority he brought to large public formats; it remains among the most reproduced of his non-poster works precisely because it captures the two registers of his artistic personality: the decorative and the directly observed.