Portrait of a Cat, Li Ti, Sung dynasty, Album. The National Palace Museum, Taiwan.

The ancients referred to the cat as a “li-nu”, and scholars were also quite fond of cats, which became one of the subjects favored by artists through the ages. This is the tenth leaf from the album “Famous Paintings of the Sung and Yüan”, in which a yellow and white cat appears to have been startled by something in front of it. Staring with its paw raised, it seems to have been taken aback in this very nimble and cute pose. The artist took painstaking effort to render each and every hair of the cat's fur, using rougher brushwork for the patch of white on the cat's chest to suggest the three-dimensional effect of the longer hair growing there. In fact, great precision was taken in rendering the cat with brushstrokes and ink washes. In the upper right is the artist's signature that reads, “Brushed by Li Ti in the ‘chia-wu' year”. The lower part of the leaf itself bears the trace of a rectangular patch, which is probably where the signature was originally located, but later cut off and remounted in its presented location.