The Photographed Cat: Picturing Close Human-Feline Ties 1900-1940

7. Peaceable Kingdom

113 To better understand the importance and meaning of the images in this book, we need to step back and consider them as a group. To write them off as mere snapshots in the narrowest of ways suggests that the photographs were casually made with little forethought and carried little or no emotional value to the people who appeared in them, owned the animals, or received the photographs from afar as postcards. No doubt some early-twentieth-century cat photographs do fall into this category. But many of the images we have shared suggest that more went on emotionally and symbolically behind the scenes of these printed images. We can use a famous American oil painting, predating these photographs by only a few decades, to consider this intentional and meaningful take on these pictures and help give them a deeper, personal context. Peaceable Kingdom is an eighteenth-century painting by Edward Hicks showing a large mix of wild and domestic animals as well as people at 7 Peaceable Kingdom 7.1. Beauty, the male chick-rearing cat, 1889. T. Weseloh coll. 114 The Photographed Cat peace with one another. Hicks created this work, in fact an entire series of such paintings, in the early to mid-1800s as a visual sermon based on a passage from the Book of Isaiah that describes a calm and safe world among different species. The painting is widely recognized, understood, and enjoyed today as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, starting with “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb.” Benign animals are lying down with trusting infants in a world of equanimity, and in the background William Penn signs a peace treaty with the local Indians. It was not just Hicks who hoped for a world where predators lie down with prey and where all creatures live in harmony with each other. The popularity of Peaceable Kingdom only increased during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even today, people of all walks of life take comfort in the idea expressed in Peaceable Kingdom that human–animal friendship can exist and produce a jointly experienced state of calmness, security, and mutual understanding. Although the photographers and subjects behind the images in our book did not have in mind Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom or the words from Isaiah when they made these pictures, their creations nonetheless speak to a similar sentiment and suggest similar benefits of friendship among the species. These photographic conceptions of cats, what they meant to some people, and what kind of life they possibly had in our human world depict a peaceable kingdom, too—a visual interspecies paradise. Photographs abound of people in serene settings enjoying the company of their cats and other animals. As in Hicks’s paintings, the subjects of these images, both human and animal, are lying down with each other in nature. In the photo postcard of illustration 7.2, the dog and cat rest calmly in the presence of their protectors, whose smiles hint at the contentment they likely felt while savoring the moment. Photographs also drew from the peaceable kingdom theme when they depicted cats caring for other animals, extending themselves to help other kinds of animals in need. Stories about cats doing unusual or folksy things were very popular at the close of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. An 1883 New York Times article entitled “Strange Companionship” described an unusual relationship that developed between a 7.2. Picnic with dog and cat. T. Weseloh coll. Peaceable Kingdom 115 large Maltese cat and a goldfish in one Philadelphia home; the cat allegedly would gently paw the fish’s back, while purring, and occasionally catch a fly, which it would drop into the aquarium for its friend the goldfish to eat (New York Times 1883). Taking advantage of such popular curiosities, local photographers would hear about a cat that nursed rats or squirrels and make a portrait of the mother cat in the act of nurturing. The earliest altruistic portrait, of “Beauty, the male chick-rearing cat,” captured the public’s interest in 1889. A photo portrait was widely circulated with his “remarkable ” story on the reverse side (see illus. 7.1). The story claimed that at three months old Beauty saw some chicks, immediately adopted them, and began brooding, playing, and caring for them, just like a hen. Although Beauty had sharp teeth and claws and was known as a great mouser...