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The Philosopher's Shirt

Cat by Artist

The same cat, filtered through art history. Turns out style is not decoration — it changes what the animal appears to be thinking.

Each version is recognizable, which is the whole pleasure of it. The full range here — tees, women's tees, sweatshirts and hoodies, all printed to order as you buy them. An art gift for art lovers. Same cat. Entirely different century.

Questions about this design

What does the Cat by Artist design show?
The same cat drawn six times, each in the manner of a famous painter – Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Seurat, Pollock, Picasso and Dalí. The joke is also an idea from aesthetics – style is not decoration added afterwards, it changes what we see. The cat is identical; its century, mood and apparent thoughts are not.
Did Leonardo da Vinci draw cats?
Yes. His best-known sheet, Cats, lions and a dragon (c. 1517–18, Royal Collection), shows more than twenty cats sleeping, stalking, playing and fighting, plus a small dragon. He also sketched the Christ Child with a cat. The popular line “The smallest feline is a masterpiece” is widely attributed to him, but usually without any source.
What is chiaroscuro, and why is Rembrandt famous for it?
Chiaroscuro, Italian for light-dark, is the use of strong contrasts between light and shadow to model forms and create drama. Rembrandt (1606–1669) made it his signature – faces and hands glow out of deep darkness, as in The Night Watch (1642, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
What is pointillism?
A technique developed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in the mid-1880s – instead of mixing colours on the palette, the painter sets small dots of pure colour side by side, and the viewer's eye blends them at a distance. The landmark work is Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86, Art Institute of Chicago).
What is drip painting or action painting?
From 1947 Jackson Pollock laid canvases on the floor and dripped, poured and flung paint onto them, so the picture records the movement of the painter's body. The critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term action painting in his 1952 essay The American Action Painters; it belongs to Abstract Expressionism.
What is Cubism?
An art movement founded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque around 1907–08. Cubists broke objects into geometric planes and showed them from several viewpoints at once, rejecting the single fixed perspective used since the Renaissance. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is usually seen as its starting point.
Did Picasso paint cats?
Yes, and rarely as cuddly pets. Cat Catching a Bird (1939), painted on the eve of the Second World War, shows a cat savagely seizing a bird and is often read as an image of violence. In Dora Maar au Chat (1941), a small black cat sits behind the portrait's subject.
What is Surrealism, and what is Dalí known for?
Surrealism, launched by André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), tried to free the imagination of the unconscious, dreams and chance from rational control. Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) became its most famous painter; his melting watches in The Persistence of Memory (1931, MoMA) turned dream logic into an icon.
Who is the Cat by Artist design a good gift for?
For art teachers and art history students, museum lovers, cat people and anyone who can tell a Seurat from a Pollock at a glance. The design comes as a T-shirt, women's T-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker, so it works for the classroom, the studio or the coffee break.