Getty Buys Mme Pompadour's Cat

Louis XV Ormolu-Mounted Chinese Turquoise-Glaze Porcelain Cat ("Pompadour Cat"), early 18th century (cat) and second half of 18th century (cushion and stool). Getty Museum

The Getty Museum has acquired a gilt bronze-mounted Chinese porcelain cat that was owned by Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV. Poised between East and West, beautiful and bizarre, the work exemplifies the 18th-century French fascination with Chinese porcelain. 

The cat is a rediscovery, identified in 2017 and published on the cover of the Mar. 2019 issue of Colnaghi Journal. Christie's offered it for private sale in 2021. The porcelain figure was created for export in Qianlong China. Its turquoise blue color—variously described as celestial blue, celadon blue, or violet—was especially sought after by European collectors. Only a few Chinese cats of this color, size, and quality survive. Inclusive of the gilt base, it measures 17-1/8 in. high.

François-Hubert Drouais, Madame de Pompadour at her Tambour Frame, 1763-64. National Gallery, London

A hole on the cat's back may have been for inserting a candle or incense. In China cat figurines were used as nightlights, as in a small (3.7 in. high) black-and-white example in the British Museum.

Cat Nightlight, Kangxi China, 1690-1722. British Museum

The ancien régime's attitude towards Asian porcelain was paradoxical. They prized its otherness, yet preferred to domesticate it with Rococo or Neoclassical ornament alien to China. Pompadour's cat is a deeply hybrid object. It's believed that Parisian luxury-goods dealer Lazare Duvaux commissioned French artisans to produce the cat's gilt-bronze cushion and the rose enamel-colored glass eyes. The dealer invoiced the Countess d'Estrades for the cat (or a similar one?) in Dec. 1754. The Countess may have given it to Madame Pompadour, a voracious collector of porcelain, as a New Year's gift. In any case, an inventory made the day of Pompadour's 1764 death describes a "cat of antique violet porcelain on a base of gilt bronze valued at two hundred livres." It was displayed in a Cabinet des Muses in her Paris apartment.

Pompadour's brother inherited the cat and flipped it to wealthy tax collector Pierre-Louis-Paul Randon de Boisset. It was apparently Randon de Boisset who added the Neoclassical stool with acorn legs, by 1776. The cat was subsequently sold to Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, husband of painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. After Le Brun's death it fell out of sight until recently.

Mme Pompadour's cat joins about two dozen pieces of French-mounted Chinese and Japanese porcelain in the Getty collection and is the only example with a figurative subject. As a unique object with a royal provenance, it becomes the most significant addition to the French decorative arts holdings in years. 

Detail of Pompadour Cat

Back view, Pompadour Cat