Wild Cat
1850
Rosa Bonheur was a 19th-century French artist who didn't just paint animals; she practically lived with them to get every whisker and paw pad exactly right. In this 1850 masterpiece of Realism, a wildcat lounges casually on a forest floor, its gaze fixed intently on something just out of frame. Bonheur was famous for wearing men's clothing to visit slaughterhouses and study animal anatomy, a radical move that gave her paintings an unmatched, lifelike intensity. You can almost feel the coarse texture of the cat's striped tail and the soft moss beneath its paws.
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