About this work
The man at the centre of this canvas sits in a composed, slightly ceremonial pose: dark suit, high white collar, and a vivid red fez that pulls the eye immediately upward.
To his left, a tabby cat with striking green eyes occupies a small table, staring out at the viewer with the same unblinking steadiness as its companion.
Behind the pair, a tree and a sky of pale, rounded clouds open up the scene, while factory smokestacks in the distance quietly invoke the industrial world pressing in around this moment of stillness. Rousseau renders it all with his characteristic economy — flattened space, simplified forms, and a controlled use of color, the composition centering on the sitter's face and upper torso in direct, frontal engagement with the viewer.
The subject is Pierre Loti — naval officer, poet, and travel writer, born Julien Viaud — whose popular books updated the myth of the exotic for French readers, and whose work both Gauguin and probably Rousseau numbered themselves among.
Rousseau made the portrait following the publication of Loti's book *Au Maroc*, written after Loti's return from Morocco — likely the reason for the fez.
The cat, meanwhile, was deliberate: Loti's love of cats was widely known, and he wove feline references into his writing across subjects and genres.
The satirist Georges Courteline acquired the painting from Rousseau in 1906 and incorporated it into his self-styled "Musée des Horreurs" — a collection of curiosities and Sunday paintings — an irony that time has thoroughly reversed. The painting now lives at the Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland.
Two figures hold their ground here — man and cat, both unsmiling, both absolutely certain of the viewer's attention — and that double gaze is what makes this painting such a particular presence on a wall. It suits a study, a library, or any interior where books and a certain intellectual restlessness coexist. The muted landscape and the warm punctuation of the red fez mean it earns its place equally in cooler, neutral rooms and in spaces with deeper, earthier tones. For the viewer willing to look closely, the painting becomes a meditation on how portraiture negotiates identity and artistic voice — a meeting of a popular writer's public image and an unconventional painter's singular vision.
