A Pricey Cat Door
I am one of those many people who, at one time in their life, consider themselves dyed-in-the-wool dog people. I had a wonderful Siberian Husky names Rosie. Alas, that was years ago, and now I have a wonderful rescue cat named Marie. My wife and I recently bought her a cat house [ed: “cathouse” as a single word denotes a brothel; we did not purchase our cat a brothel] with a soft floor that is heated like an electric blanket so she can recline in warm comfort on our porch and watch birds hop around.
This purchase was a little more expensive than I would have liked, but I withheld my misgivings to avoid pariah status. I stumbled across a tale of a similar feline luxury that far surpasses our purchase of the Toozey (the brand name).
I love the dreamy, otherworldly, mythological themes of many of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s paintings. He lived from 1775 to 1851 and, in my opinion, could be considered the national painter of England during high Romanticism. Oh, and by the way, I wrote a cool novel based on his 1834 painting The Golden Bough.
So J.M.W. Turner painted Fishing Upon the Blythe-Sand, Tide Setting In in 1809. It is a respectable “fine art” size of about 41 × 53 inches and features an almost El Greco-esque sky and really brilliant illumination on ships’ sails, gulls, and sea froth. The texture of the canvas is clearly visible behind the oil throughout much of the painting. This is not the case at all with The Golden Bough. There are reasons this work seems so raw and, well, unpolished, and the reasons are not artistic in nature.
When he set down his palette at the completion of Blythe-Sand, Turner was at the top of his game. He was the sweetheart of the Royal Academy, and his works hung amid those Old Master works in fine manors through England and the continent. Despite his incredible esteem and the cheques rolling in, he was … not the most diligent housekeeper. Or maybe he suffered from a mental condition similar to his mother's; I shouldn’t surmise. The windows of house on Queen Anne Street in London were so dirty as to almost exclude all outside light, and thick dust on furniture and piles of undeposited cash and checks were disturbed only by the paws of the many tailless (?!) cats who held dominion over the residence. Turner had very few visitors.
Apparently one item in his haunted mansion he cherished and, presumably, dusted once in a while was his own painting Fishing Upon the Blythe-Sand, Tide Setting In. According to Walter Thornbury in his two-volume biography on Turner, the artist hung the painting near the fireplace in his Miss Havisham-esque abode. One (or more) of his cats used one of the broken windows in this house as an egress to attend to their indoor and outdoor cat duties, and, when the London air turned cold, Turner needed a way to keep out the foggy cold while allowing his beloved feline roomies free admittance to and exit from his bachelor pad.
So, naturally, J.M.W. Turner took his painting, Fishing Upon the Blythe-Sand, Tide Setting In, which, at market now, would probably fetch a couple million dollars, and utilized it to cover the broken window as a cat flap. As Thornbury puts it, the painting “served as the blind to a window that was the private entrée of the painter’s favorite cat, who, one day, indignant at finding such an obstinate obstacle in her way, left the autograph of her ‘Ten Commandments’ on the picture.” She shredded the painting with her claws.
The artist was upset with neither the cat’s violent outburst nor his own decision to use a painting he surely spent hours producing as a catflap. The painting is now in a backroom at the Tate Gallery, London. Restoration has supposedly repaired five large rips in the canvas, not the “Ten Commandments” Thornbury noted.
What does this all mean? We could analyze the interesting distinction between “value” as seen by the artist versus “value” to the public. Or we could discuss the utility of art (therapeutic to the artist? capital to the owner?). Or we could just give it all a “hmm, ok” and leave it at that.
