delacroix whips out a cat drawing

image and text in public domain

"Fac-simile of a drawing by Eugene Delacroix," reads the caption on this illustration, found in the 1885 edition of Champfleury's The Cat, Past and Present (this little guy is on page 36).  Delacroix is I'd say by far the best known French Romantic painter, an artist of color, drama, passion, exoticism.  He rather looked like a cat himself. (As a young man he was extraordinarily handsome.)  Champfleury says that Delacroix "made tigers of his cats," meaning he used them as bases for his grander paintings of tigers.  I can see some of that in the almost comic hauteur of this sketch.