A crouching cat

A single crouching cat holds the whole scene in this ink study by Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, a Japanese-French artist who made a name for himself in Paris. Foujita spent his early years in Japan before settling in France, where he found a way to bring together two art worlds that rarely met. He borrowed the soft, flowing brushwork of East Asian ink painting and paired it with the subjects and mood of European art. Cats turned up in his work again and again, so often that people came to think of him as the painter who understood felines best. His signature here appears in both Japanese characters and Roman letters, a small sign of the two cultures he carried with him.

The charm of this piece lies in how little it needs to say. A handful of sure strokes and gentle ink washes are enough to show a cat pressed low to the ground, body coiled, gaze locked on something outside the frame. It might be about to spring, or maybe just puzzled by a distant noise. Nothing crowds the animal, since the warm tone of the paper is left mostly bare, giving the cat all the room it needs. Rather than a stiff, posed portrait, this reads like a fleeting moment, the sort of thing any cat owner would spot and grin at.