an array of cats

Lorenz Froelich, Studier af katte, 1839, Statens Museum for Kunst, www.smk.dk, public domain

One of these cat studies is the merest three-line ink sketch of two closed eyes and a nose.  Do you see it?  The wonderful thing about it is that it still looks exactly like a cat and nothing else.  This simplicity is all the more wonderful when you look at all the work of Danish painter/illustrator Lorenz Froelich (1820-1908). Froelich produced an extremely large amount of art including public art commissions and wall hangings, but it is as a book illustrator that he is best known.  You can see a sizable sampling of his work here.  He was best known, and very well known, for his illustrations for children's books.  Those tend to be intricately crafted and detailed, as you'll see here in his work for the book A Butterfly Chase.  This page of cat studies shows us how this craftsman built his forms from the essence up, from two eyes and a nose to a fully furred and articulated feline face.