A native of Lausanne, Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (French/Swiss, 1859–1923) began his artistic career as a designer of printed fabrics. In 1881, he moved to Paris, settling in Montmartre, and began to frequent the literary cabaret known as Le Chat Noir, founded by a fellow Swiss expatriate Louis Rodolphe Salis. It was there Steinlen met and befriended writers, such as Paul Verlaine, and artists Jean-Louis Forain, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Louis Anquetin, Henry Somm, Adolphe Willette, Félix Vallotton, and Caran d’Ache, among others. The artists of Le Chat Noir established something of a private club or society of aesthetes. Steinlen was soon contributing illustrations to the associated journal Le Chat Noir, and this success led him to become one of the foremost illustrators in Paris at the turn of the century.

At times using the pseudonym Jean Caillou, Steinlen submitted drawings to other satirical publications, including Le Mirliton and, from 1891 onwards, Gil Blas, for whom he made over 400 drawings. It was the success of his work for Gil Blas that established Steinlen’s reputation outside France. Among the more than 30 magazines to which he also contributed were Le Croquis, La Revue Illustree, and Le Canard Sauvage. Steinlen depicted all manner of Parisian society in his drawings and illustrations, with a particular emphasis on the life of the working class.

Like his contemporaries Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha, he was also active as a designer of theatrical and cabaret posters; an important means of disseminating his work, and one that greatly added to his popularity. A friend and collaborator of the songwriter Aristide Bruant, Steinlen provided illustrations for sheet music covers, and also illustrated a number of books, including Guy de Maupassant’s Le Vagabond and Anatole France’s L’Affaire Crainquebille.

He enjoyed the first of many successful exhibitions of paintings and drawings in 1894, and, in 1909, gained the distinction of a room devoted solely to his work at the Salon d’Automne. As a draughtsman, Steinlen employed a wide variety of media, including black, blue, and colored chalks, ink, pencil, watercolor, and charcoal. His fondness for animals, and, in particular, cats, was noted even as early as his schooldays, when he drew sketches of cats in the margins of his notebooks. Cats seem to have appealed to Steinlen for their charm, movement, and character, as well as for their symbolic properties. His house on the rue Caulaincourt in Paris was, according to contemporary accounts, a meeting place for all the cats of the quarter. In his early years as an artist, he would sell drawings of cats in exchange for food, and, in later years, a cat would usually appear in most of his drawings, magazine illustrations, lithographs, and posters. Several of Steinlen’s studies of cats were compiled in an undated publication entitled Des Chats: Images Sans Paroles, while other, previously unknown drawings were published after the artist’s death in Georges Lecomte’s Chats Et Autres Bêtes Dessins Inédits, which appeared in Paris in 1933. This large, frieze-like drawing was one of a pair of drawings of cats intended to illustrate the margins of a special four-page supplement to the weekly journal L’Illustration, accompanying an article on cats by Jacques Dalbray published in March 1901.