All the little anatomical details on the cat make this great. The Henry’s pocket, the scrunched up nose, the retracted claws correctly being shown as a ‘split’ in the front of the paw… it’s just so cool to see artists from 100+ years ago seeing and portraying this without the sort of simplified visual language we grew up with in cartoons, books, etc for what a cat looks like.
All the little anatomical details on the cat make this great. The Henry’s pocket, the scrunched up nose, the retracted claws correctly being shown as a ‘split’ in the front of the paw… it’s just so cool to see artists from 100+ years ago seeing and portraying this without the sort of simplified visual language we grew up with in cartoons, books, etc for what a cat looks like.
Then by contrast you have paintings from Europe, from the same period, where the artist has clearly never seen a cat.