Monday 23rd December - Women's Rights - A Meeting

 Oh no! We are down to our penultimate Catvent and for the last two days I seemed to have ended up with two completely different sides of myself.  So, let's start today's post...

Oh my goodness, today is going to be a shouty one, I can feel it coming.  We have lightly touched on the idea of women being 'catlike' and having an affinity with all things feline over the last 22 days, but today we are taking it to an interesting new level...

Women's Rights: A Meeting (1885) William Henry Hamilton Trood

Right, we'll have to take the painting and Mr Trood separately as I have a fair bit to say about both. But I'll start with the painting.  Trood had a reputation for sentimental and comic works around animals, so this is not out of his normal scope, however, it is rather political when compared to his normal fare, such as this - 

Friend or Foe (1891)

and especially this...

A Surprising Result (1887)

In fact, if you peruse Mr Trood's output, it is mainly extremely cute puppies being delightful, which makes the cat picture puzzling in a way. To put it in context, I used another, similar painting in the Narrative Art exhibition I curated in Southampton and Bournemouth a couple of years back - 

The Dogs' Home (1883) Walter Hunt

At first glance, The Dogs' Home is a sad painting about abandoned or lost dogs, with little vignettes of different dogs behaving in different ways, but it is actually a comment on how different classes cope in diversity and society's treatment of the most in need.  The working dog unable to work despairs on the right. The little posh dog who has lost its ribbon is unable to get food for himself and in the middle, the noble hound looks out at us, inviting us to work out how we would manage in such a situation and what we could do to help.  Now let's look at the cats...

We have the central figure, like in the dogs' home, who seems to look out at us to draw us into the scene.  She is wearing her ribbon of office but it is difficult to see what her expression is - is she fed up? Is she angry? She doesn't look happy, that's for sure. What of her companions?

There is a lot going on in this group.  Starting at the back, the back and white cat seems transfixed by the peacock feathers, which also appear in front of the cat rolling round with a crazed look on her face.  The Chairman gets the same after I open the 'Cosmic Catnip' from Pets at Home. That stuff is alarmingly strong. The peacock feather symbolises the vanity and frivolity of women and their easy distraction with pretty things. The pair about to get clawed by the drug-fuelled cat are interesting - as we covered with The Favourite, you don't get ginger girls that often, so is that cat a male supporter of women's rights and apparently just there to pick up women?  Chicks dig Equality, you can't fault his reasoning. The other less likely explanation, which is no less insulting, is that she is a ginger female, and therefore we have rampent cat lesbianism at our women's rights meeting. What can I say? Chicks dig Chicks who dig Equality.

On the left of our Chair-cat of the meeting we have this beautiful white cat and her pink collar.  She is book-ended on the right by this tortoiseshell one...

What on earth are they representing?  Both are fancy cats, so do they represent the upper classes and their involvement in the fight for women's rights? They actually look a bit put off because of the chaos, so maybe they are meant to be sensible, middle class women who will not be returning to this sort of nonsense, thank you.

And behind them is this black cat, in a right state, literally caterwauling. For goodness sake.

This is a strange painting to judge the tone of, as the title might not be the one that the artist intended. It is definitely a painting of a meeting, hence the sign on the back wall 'A MEETING WILL BE HELD' and the roll of papers under the paws of the black and white cat.  Yes, there is a link in society between women and cats, but I'm not convinced that Trood intended this to be a piece of biting anti-women political satire, especially as that doesn't seem to be his forte. In the same year (1885) Trood exhibited Fellow Feeling Makes Us Wondrous Kind at the Royal Academy, showing a cat looking at a proud dog's little puppies in wonder. It would seem an odd move to also do a painting about how ridiculous women are, especially as women's suffrage had slightly stalled at this point, trundling haltingly in and out of political discourse. Trood had some of his work in Punch which was satirical - also in 1885, his painting Puppy Class was used to mock politicians...

An Engraving of Puppy Class

The 'hilarious' Punch cartoon.  Oh, how we laughed.

In Mr Trood's defence, I call upon the Western Daily Press to vindicate him somewhat - when reporting on an exhibition in October 1885, they wrote 

'Among prominent objects are specimens of his work sent in by Mr W H Trood of Taunton, who gives such clever delineation of dog and cat subjects. It was but the other week that Mr Trood's "Puppy Class" afforded scope for the artist of Punch to produce a political adaptation; and now he has issued a companion picture, a row of cats, with expressive countenances, which someone has termed "Women's rights."'

Now, the interesting bit in the above for me is 'someone has termed' implying that it wasn't the original title or intent of the work but then just stuck. Punch were notoriously no friend to the suffragist, so the connection and message seems to have attached itself to something that might only have intended to represent a disorderly meeting with the many different types of people who attend.  Mr Trood might have very little say in it.

William Henry Hamilton Trood is a fascinating man indeed and again, one who there is a misunderstanding about. I saw in various places that he had been born both deaf and non-verbal, with one obituarist allegedly saying how well he had done for someone born deaf and dumb.  Well, actually, that wasn't true, and I can thoroughly recommend Britain's Deaf Heritage by Peter W Jackson for being a tad more accurate.  A bit like Emma Irlam Briggs, Trood had become deaf around 5 years old after an illness but it didn't hold him back.  He had started drawing dogs aged 4, and after some private schooling had embarked on a very successful career, including being presented a silver-gilded and jewelled Damascus sword from the Sultan of Morocco for services rendered. He was a frequent traveller and his work was well known and liked due to its commercial and humorous nature.  Sadly, he died young, at only 39 years old, after a brief illness.

Wait Till The Clouds Roll By (1893)

It seems unfair that a seemingly gentle, humorous image of cats ended up representing a certain type of male distain for little ladies getting ideas about equality.  Some paintings end up with a half dozen names because over time their owners have called them different things, but it is definitely up to us to question the origins, especially if it puts an artist on the wrong side of history.

See you tomorrow for the finale....