Susan Herbert's feline versions of famous paintings have found an appreciative audience among both cat and art lovers. It was inevitable that she should be attracted to the works of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, whose heyday was in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but whose popularity has reached new heights today. Well-known works by such artists as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Holman Hunt can be viewed in a new and entrancing way when their protagonists are endearing cats. The Beggar Maid, "more beautiful than day" in Tennyson's poem, takes on a particularly touching relationship with King Cophetua, while Medea gives new meaning to the word enchantress as she prepares the ingredients for a spell. And were ever two creatures so frightened and so abandoned as the poor cat princes wickedly imprisoned in the tower, or two lovers so sad and so stoical as the young officer cat and his fiance on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo? A special feature of this book is its inclusion of black-and-white reproductions of all the original paintings that have inspired Herbert. They afford interesting and surprising comparisons, concluding a book of irresistible delights on every page.
