Explore Cats at the Archives of American Art

Remember life before the internet? Back in the day when, if you wanted to show your friend on the other side of the country some silly thing your cat liked to do, you couldn’t just shoot off an email with a link. Oh no. You had to draw. A picture. On a piece of paper. And send it. In the mail. With a stamp. Remember that?

The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art remembers, and that’s why “Cat Correspondence” is one section of the exhibition titled Before Internet Cats: Feline Finds from the Archives of American Art. The exhibition is on view at the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery in Washington, DC, but you can explore the items from the comfort of your own computer. We picked out just a few of our favorites to share with you here.

First up is an ink drawing of a cat and three mice, by Charles Green Shaw (1892-1974). Find this and other sketches in "Cats and the Creative Process."

Here is a photograph of Tuffy the cat, from the papers of abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann (1880-1966). Photographer and date unknown. Find this and other photographs, and even a 1958 Cat Fancier's Association registration form, in "Everyday Life."

And last, wouldn't you love to get this in the mail? It's a piece of "mail art" sent by influential fiber artist Lenore Tawney (1907-2007) in 1980. Find it and some other neat pieces in "Cat Correspondence."

Details

• Before Internet Cats runs through October 29, 2017.
• The Fleischman Gallery is located in the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, 8th and F Streets, NW, Washington, DC.
• Hours are 11:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. daily.
• Admission is free.

Cat of the Week: Sheridan in DC

Each week in this space, we feature a senior cat in need of adoption or sponsorship. Please remember all the older cats in shelters. They make great companions, and unlike kittens, they (probably) won’t climb the curtains! Adopt a senior cat, and help him or her enjoy the best years of their life.

Today, please meet Sheridan, an older gentleman who is really laid back and sweet. He likes being near someone, and he soaks up loving attention. His other main interest is food. Sheridan is 15 years old, and unfortunately he has had to have all of his teeth removed. This means he can eat only wet food, but don’t think that a lack of teeth stops him! Just check him out on Instagram (#toothlessbutmighty). We just love his sweet old face!

Sheridan is currently in a foster home through the Humane Rescue Alliance. Find out more about him here.

Can’t adopt but still want to help? Learn how you can sponsor an animal at the Humane Rescue Alliance, or check out this page to learn other ways to donate.

Book Review: From Garden to Grave

On this Mysterious Monday, we review the first book in the Leafy Hollow series by Rickie Blair: it’s got murder (naturally), secrets, gardening, and a cat—so, everything you need, basically.

The story

Verity Hawkes is an unemployed bookkeeper who, at just twenty-something, is a young widow and has not left her Vancouver apartment building in two years. She spends her days alone and reads a lot of self-help books—though we’re not sure they’re doing her much good, because, you know, she’s still shut up in the apartment.

Well, Verity’s world gets a sudden jolt when she gets a call telling her that her aunt Adeline, who is—um, let’s call her “interesting”—presumed dead. Verity needs to go all the way to Leafy Hollow to deal with things. Maybe it will do her good to get out, and it would be nice to see Leafy Hollow again, and surely Aunt Adeline isn’t really dead… So off Verity goes, but what she finds is nothing like what she expected.

First, the idyllic cottage she remembers from her childhood is practically a ruin. Second, the clients of Aunt Adeline’s landscaping business expect Verity to step in and take over horticultural duties. Well, Verity does need money, so she agrees to do her very first landscaping job—and quickly makes a mess of it. This leads to an argument with the exceptionally rude client, and when said rude client later falls off a ladder, gets caught in a coyote trap, and is finally killed in an “accident,” Verity becomes a suspect in the crime. It’s up to her and her new Leafy Hollow friends to prove her innocence and find out what really happened to Adeline, who seems to have been caught up in some sort of secret something... It's all very mysterious!

The cat

One of her new friends is a one-eyed cat she names Tom (at first; he gets a better name later). He is “a bedraggled silver gray tabby [whose] tattered ears stuck out at odd angles,” so he sort of fits in with the falling-apart cottage. Tom at first shows up only to eat, but he later becomes more permanent. We hope to see more of him in future volumes, as we think he will make a nice companion for Verity.

Our verdict

We enjoyed this book very much. It’s a nice start to the series, with a perfect setup for future developments (just what did happen to Adeline?). We liked Verity’s spunk, her willingness to do whatever needs to be done—even if she doesn’t know how. She’ll figure it out as she goes along. We look forward to seeing her continue to grow in this series. Leafy Hollow is filled with a pleasing cast of characters, each of whom adds a dash of spice to the book. And the plot moves along at a nice pace, with enough twists and turns to keep things interesting. We can’t say we were totally surprised by the killer’s identity, but getting a big shock at the end is not really the point of a cozy. Getting engrossed in a story and a setting filled with quirky characters is the point, and From Garden to Grave does that wonderfully.

Recommended!

A note on the "Paws Up" system: Miss C gives either one or two paws up. One paw is for a good read; two paws is for a great read. She never gives three or four paws because that would require her to lie on her back...and Miss C does not do that!

The link below is an Amazon Associates link. If you purchase the book through this link, old SoLT and I could get some coin for our kibble account. Thank you!

Sunday Selfie: Talk to the Tail

No one was in the mood to take selfies this week, at least not when She of Little Talent was trying to take them. (Memo to old SoLT: Cats don't want to take selfies when it is dinnertime and you are messing around with a phone instead of serving up tasty wet morsels like you should be doing. Put that on a sticky note or something.) For her efforts, she was rewarded with views of cats' backsides, like such:

Real Cat Paisley

Real Cat Webster

Well, at least Webster's didn't need to be censored for the daytime audience!

We are entering these so-called selfies in the Sunday Selfies blog hop, hosted by The Cat on My Head.

Caturday Art: Paisley Cat

Today we join Athena's Caturday Art blog hop with this picture of Real Cat Paisley:

She of Little Talent thinks she is rather clever because she used the Pasley (not a typo; that's how they spell it) art effect in LunaPic. It came out in black and white, like this:

We thought it needed some color, so old SoLT went to PicMonkey and messed about with the color temperature and saturation, and then she messed about some more with the levels, which put some white areas back in. Then she just added a frame and the text.

Here's the original:

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Plus Friendly Fill-Ins

Friendly Fill-Ins

And now it’s time for Friendly Fill-Ins, from 15andmeowing and McGuffy’s Reader. They are a fun way to learn a little bit about the authors of the blogs you read. The first two questions, answered by old SoLT this week,  are from Ellen of 15andmeowing, and the next two, answered by Real Cat Paisley,  are from Annie of McGuffy’s Reader.

Old SoLT’s answers

1. Remember when all anyone had was a landline, and we couldn’t imagine anything else? Once upon a time, we didn't all have panic attacks when we realized we'd left the house without our phone!

2. My most treasured piece of jewelry is … Mmm … well, I do have some jewelry that I enjoy and would be sad to lose, but I wouldn’t call any of it “treasured”—no family heirlooms or anything.

Real Cat Paisley’s answers

3. This year, I have learned a whole bunch of new ways to scare the dog.

4. I would like to further expand my dog-scaring repertoire before this year is over.

Love Cat Videos? Thank Eadweard Muybridge

I’ll bet you’ve watched your fair share of cat videos online, haven’t you? Admit it: you’ve spent hours of your life giggling over the antics of other people’s cats. But have you ever wondered where cat videos really got their start?

To find out, let’s meet a pioneer in motion studies: Eadweard Muybridge (yes, that’s how he spelled it; we’ll get to that).

Muybridge and motion

Eadweard Muybridge ca. 1899.
Photo reproduced in Optic Projection, 1914.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) was born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England. He later changed the spelling of his name to what he believed to be the original Anglo-Saxon form. Muybridge immigrated to the United States when he was 20 and started trying to photograph motion in 1872. He’d been hired by former California governor Leland Stanford to prove that all four of a horse’s legs were off the ground at a particular point in its trotting gait. This proved difficult, though, as Muybridge’s camera didn’t have a fast enough shutter. In any event, the locomotion studies got put on hold after Muybridge shot and killed his wife’s lover. He was acquitted in his 1875 trial on the grounds of “justifiable homicide,” and in 1877 he started working on motion photography again. This time he set up a battery of 12 cameras with a shutter speed of 2 one-thousandths of a second. This allowed him to finally prove Stanford’s contention about a trotting horse’s hooves. Later setups used a series of 24 cameras.

In 1879, Muybridge created a thing he called a zoopraxiscope, which was basically an early movie projector. It worked by projecting images from a rotating disk to give the illusion of motion. He used this device in lecture tours across the United States and Europe.

This series of 24 photos shows a cat running. Photographed by Eadweard Muybridge, June 13, 1887.
From the book Animal Locomotion, pl. 720, via Library of Congress.

Animal Locomotion

Muybridge worked under the sponsorship of the University of Pennsylvania through much of the 1880s, taking movement studies of human models and of animals from the Philadelphia Zoo. His work was important to the development of biomechanics, photography, and motion pictures, and his images are still used by artists who want to portray figures in motion. In 1887, his photos were published in the book Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements. This volume had 781 plates and 20,000 photographs, including the series of cat photos above. And if you take a series of Muybridge’s cat photos and run them in sequence … you get a cat video:

So, next time you hurt your sides guffawing at some cat video on YouTube, take a moment to remember and thank Eadweard Muybridge, who made it all possible.

Sources

Biography.com, “Eadweard Muybridge,” http://www.biography.com/people/eadweard-muybridge-9419513

Encyclopedia Britannica, “Eadweard Muybridge,” last updated Feb. 25, 2011, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eadweard-Muybridge

Wikipedia, “Eadweard Muybridge,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge.