Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
This week Chris looks back in time to when cats first took over the world...
Idly browsing a customer’s impressive walls of artwork recently, closely escorted by a tiny scruffy Burman cat named Skipton who generally attempts to adhere himself to my shoes, I spotted a painting of a young Victorian girl in a blue dress.
There in the forefront of the painting, on the girl’s knee and apparently staring at the artist, was an alarmed looking tabby cat.
I stood for quite some time pondering exactly how these people managed to get a tabby to sit stock still throughout an entire portrait painting. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but in Portsmouth there’s a famous painting showing the officers of the HMS Victory standing proudly on deck, one of whom is my direct ancestor, Signals Lieutenant John Pascoe. I bring this up again for a reason – whereas the portrait’s tabby is seen facing the artist, Signals Lieutenant Pascoe is the only one of the officers staring fixedly in the wrong direction.
Back to the painting, and my mind finally reached the real point of interest – this cat was clearly a beloved member of the girl’s household and not just some live-in mouser. So how long has all this been going on, I wondered? Exactly when did cats first manage to pin us under their paws and become masters rather than servants?
Skipton was halfway up my jeans by now, so I picked him up, held him in my arms and mumbled, “This needs looking into Skipton, my furry friend.”
Skipton bit my nose. Quite hard. Like my daughter, who strongly believes me to be her chauffeur, he hates being picked up late.
And so my research began. I carried out scores of internet searches on the subject, trying to ascertain exactly how and when it was that cats stopped being Rentokil and became domestic pets. Among my finds were many pieces of art going back hundreds of years, the most curious of these being an 1800s’ piece named TheCat’sLunch by Marguerite Gérard, which appears to depict an extremely annoyed cat, ears pinned back and eyes narrowed, angrily biting an empty plate. I can only assume his violent attitude towards the plate was because there’s not a single morsel of “lunch” on it.
I know a little on the subject, having once researched Marie Antoinette’s pet Angora cats, rumoured to have mated with US cats to create the famous Maine Coon breed.
So that takes us back to the 1700s. Any internet advance on that? Yep, back to the 1500s and Henry VIII seems to have been given a pet cat as a gift.
Further back Romans had pet cats, as did the Greeks. The general consensus is that cats were first domesticated by the Egyptians over 4000 years ago, who believed them to be deities.
So there we have it, the widespread welcoming of cats into our homes happened because cats somehow managed to convince an entire nation they were gods. They haven’t changed at all, have they?
In the front of the painting sat an alarmed looking tabby cat