The Cats 1868 - 1869

Curator: Edouard Manet's "The Cats," at the Harvard Art Museums, offers a glimpse into the artist's lighter side. What strikes you first about this intimate print? Editor: The etching feels so raw, so immediate. It's not precious; you can almost smell the ink and the scratching of the plate. Curator: Absolutely. Manet, known for his paintings, also explored printmaking. The immediacy that you picked up on comes from the etching process itself. He would have used acid to bite into the metal plate, allowing him to create these spontaneous lines. Editor: And it’s clearly experimental. The image feels like a study in feline form and the graphic possibilities of line and tone. You have that dense, almost bulbous, dark cat versus the spare outline of the others. Curator: Yes! He's playing with positive and negative space, inviting us to consider the nature of representation itself. The materiality emphasizes the tension between rendering and reality. The image seems to ask: What does it mean to capture a cat's essence? Editor: I think I prefer the cat's essence raw, in simple ink, like this. Curator: Well, maybe Manet would have too! Thank you for that observation.