About this work
Two cats command a Parisian rooftop under a pale moon — one rendered in deep black silhouette, the other in lighter tones — locked in a ritual that is at once confrontational and theatrical. The lithograph shows two cats on a rooftop engaged in a mating game, with chimney pots rising around them like crooked sentinels. The two cats are the protagonists in a ritual dance; the black cat is reminiscent of the animal in *Olympia*, and the moonlight setting with its ghostly actors — cats and chimney pots — produces a haunting mixture of the strange and the familiar.
The final lithograph is considered the most stylized work of Manet, its composition bold and flattened, closer to graphic design than academic draftsmanship — and deliberately so.
Manet's lithograph *The Cats' Rendezvous* was created as an advertisement for Champfleury's bestselling book *Les Chats* (The Cats).
Champfleury's most popular work was his book on cats, published in 1869.
The lithograph *Le Rendez-vous des chats* was planned as a poster to advertise the book, making it one of the earliest examples of fine art consciously applied to the purpose of public advertising. In 1868, the publication of Manet's lithograph was described as "a pioneering step in launching the poster as an art form," prefiguring the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and the golden age of the French affiche by decades. Influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, Manet's cats are unusual and inventive — the high contrast, the silhouetted form, and the elimination of extraneous detail all reflect his deep engagement with Japanese aesthetics that was reshaping the Parisian avant-garde at precisely this moment.
On a wall, *Les Chats* carries an almost graphic authority — its stark black-and-white palette reads beautifully against warm plaster, bare brick, or deep painted walls. It suits a library, a studio, or a hallway where something witty and historically loaded is welcome alongside something simply beautiful. The print speaks to anyone who finds the feline world genuinely enigmatic, but also to the collector who understands that this rooftop scene is not a curiosity — it is a document of a moment when Manet quietly helped invent the visual language of modern public art.
