Celebrity Cat
Meredith Hooper, ill. Bee Willey
Published by Frances Lincoln
40pp, 1 84507 290 1, £11.99 hbk
A tour of important paintings in major collections is this time conducted via a narrative thread spun around the absence of cats in any of the pictures. There are dogs, birds, tigers and fish but no cats. This is a situation that Felissima Cat resolves to address and, paintbrush in hand, she introduces a feline presence to Van Gogh’s Chair, Rousseau’s Tiger in a Tropical Storm and then on to paintings by Velázquez, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and of course da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The process involving visits to the Prado, the Louvre, the ‘Met’ and the National Gallery in London. It’s a difficult trick to pull off visually and Bee Willey’s distinctive part-digital paintings cleverly bring the whole idea to life.
Reviewed in BfK No. 162 (January 2007) by Martin Salisbury (MS)
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