My continuing reading of the Barlow letters, now about half-way, has led me to discover a fine Lovecraftian artwork. Its excellence causes my ‘Kittee Tuesday’ feature to make a brief return.

In early 1934 Lovecraft was in New York and, having just put young Barlow on the bus, he sauntered over to the public library to peruse the new books with Belknap Long. He was rewarded by the sight of a new cat book. Steinlen’s Chats et Autres Betes had been published in Paris in 1933, and was presumably freshly catalogued and on display among the new artbooks. It has 19 black and white etched plates, seemingly very conventional, but with a tipped-in end-paper which is magnificent. Here is a good look at the whisker-twirling work, which we can only imagine had Lovecraft emitting a rare out-loud chuckle when he saw it…

It there’s ever to be a proper Lovecraft Museum in a physical building, this must surely be a prime candidate for one of the giant wall murals at the Cat Cafe.

There’s no Archive.org or other free edition of the book. While the French Gallica site does have the book’s more mundane kitties, it does not have a scan of the ensemble end-paper — presumably prised out and stolen long ago.

The faint lines on the scan are perhaps archival preservation tape applied to prevent cracking. It would be rather fab if a talented DeviantArt artist were to faithfully re-make this at 8k, perhaps with the additional of faint moonlight colour.

What was Steinlen’s inspiration? One wonders if he might have encountered Lovecraft’s story “The Cats of Ulthar” by around 1932, and if so this would be an early Lovecraft illustration. “Ulthar” had been published in Weird Tales in 1926, and presumably such things were known in the Surrealist circles of Paris in the 1920s and 30s. But possibly there were other “king o’ the cats” stories or fairy-tales in France. Can French readers offer any evidence, for a supposition that the Paris Surrealists knew of Weird Tales? Or offer a well-known source in French folk-tale or nursery-rhyme?