Karl Whitney: Why you should sketch your cats before attempting to paint tigers

With the works of an old master in mind, Karl Whitney considers the value in building a base for important work and engaging our critical skill to improve technique

Eugène Delacroix was known for his large canvases, especially the allegory of the July 1830 revolution ‘Liberty Leading the People’ (1830).

The artist Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) had an affection for animals that is reflected in his paintings and sketches. 

I have a couple of postcards bearing prints by him: one is a sketch of his cats, in various states of feline relaxation; another is of tigers in the same poses. 

The domestic animals were, in essence, models for the wild ones, which he had glimpsed at the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes.

Often, if I’m in Paris, I’ll visit the museum dedicated to Delacroix, housed in the apartment in which he lived his final years. 

A decently sized apartment, it makes a small museum, especially when crowded. 

On the day my girlfriend and I visited a few weeks ago, slightly harried guides tried to encourage us into the artist’s studio, behind the main building, to ease congestion in the main rooms.

When I go there, and especially when I’m in the back garden, I think about his cats, partly because it amuses me to think about cats, but also because I wonder what the close attention he paid to his pets says about the artist. 

Known for large canvases, notably the orgiastic historical painting The Death of Sardanapalus (1827-28) and the allegory of the July 1830 revolution Liberty Leading the People (1830), he nonetheless remains carefully attentive to minute detail and texture.

Self-portrait of Eugene Delacroix: Delacroix learned from others, why shouldn’t we learn from him? Picture: Getty

I find the oscillation between small scale and epic scene when comparing his sketches to his finished work interesting: he responds to the challenge of painting a large canvas by considering the effect the combination of elements will have on the viewer. 

What will stand out? Perhaps the glint of a brandished sword, or a ray of light catching a jewel. Will that detail distract from the overall effect desired by the artist or enhance it?

Such questions are raised in his journals, which he began as a young man, left aside for many years, and took up again in the late 1840s. 

He views other artists’ work and makes notes, or makes sketches, to glean something of their style or to understand the technical challenges which they had faced. 

He makes notes about what he approves of in their work and what he dislikes — it’s unmistakably the activity of an artist engaging his critical skill to improve his own technique.

In the early entries, made when he was in his twenties, he records how much he’s owed for work completed. Call those his freelancer years. 

In the later entries, as a mature, highly-successful artist, we get a greater sense of his perfectionism: rather than use assistants to perform some tasks connected with a large work, he carries the tasks out himself.

As I writer, I think about what I can glean from these journals.

Delacroix learned from others, why shouldn’t we learn from him?

First of all, you should sketch your cats before attempting to paint tigers.

That is, your bigger works should emerge from your smaller ones, and you shouldn’t shrink from putting something of yourself into even the most epic of works. 

The second thing that struck me — and this is very much related to Delacroix being a Romantic artist — is that it’s essential that you reflect deeply on what you want to do, how you do it, and why.

There’s obviously a danger in this of boiling down a complex artist to a couple of rules, as if artistic practice is like a management technique that can be rationalised and packaged. 

Nevertheless, we engage with the world around us and a byproduct of that interest in the world is that we may learn something that could come in useful someday. 

We might observe Delacroix, and perhaps even ourselves, in a similar manner to that with which he observed his cats.

Should one keep a diary? As a writer, it’s useful to have somewhere to keep a record of one’s reflections on life and work, but I’ve found it best to avoid using a traditional diary for such note-making. 

The pressure of having to write something, anything, every day can feel like drudgery. 

Over the years, I’ve kept copybooks, notebooks, and a series of digital documents written on word processor, all of which you might class as diaristic, and much of which contains reflections on the difficulties and satisfactions of writing.

At the centre of such an endeavour is an ongoing dialogue with yourself about who you are, what you want, and what you think. 

Coincidentally, it provides a testing ground for your own writing, helping you to develop your style and sharpen your focus. 

One can attempt to emulate the precision of Delacroix’s critical judgements by taking note of what we’re reading and considering what we might take from that work and what we wish to avoid.

When I wander through the museum that was once Eugène Delacroix’s home, as I navigate my way through the packed drawing room and bedroom, eyeing the paintings hung on the walls, I think about the artist as somehow being still present. 

Perhaps that’s an inevitability given the place’s biographical significance. But it’s also a leap of the imagination.

We’re so used to looking to past eras to find reflections of our own, failing to grasp how much the perspective we bring to that process shapes our understanding. 

Think of a classic book and how the writer might be presented to us as “our contemporary” or the novel as “speaking to the present” in some way. No matter how well-meaning such statements are, they reveal the narcissism of the present.

When Delacroix drew his cats, he wasn’t doing so to domesticate them further in his depiction. 

He wasn’t looking to make them cuter than they were; rather he was examining them for their wildness — the suggestion of a tiger’s prowl in their gait. 

He tuned into the exotic and unknowable aspects of their behaviour, retained and even amplified their difference, rather than making them familiar.

Reading the journals of an artist who lived two centuries ago, it’s tempting to find the commonalities: how he worked and how it compares to the way I work; how he approached others’ work and what he thought of it (and what I can learn from his approach).

It’s appealing to allow your imagination to fill in the gaps, making him your contemporary.

We love the idea of time travel because it flattens time in the way that we’ve been able to contort geographical distance. 

But there’s value to distance because it helps make the specificity of a place more striking, and there’s a lot to be said for postponing your understanding of a figure from the past: delay judgement until you find out more. 

Not everything is instantly intelligible, and our impatience to categorise and move on can act as a barrier to a greater understanding.

The bridge between past and present, between one person and another, between an artist and their cat, between a writer and their own life, can be as long or as short as one chooses. 

And it is a choice. You don’t have to grasp everything in a single moment. You don’t have to distil everything into a kernel of wisdom. 

Make room for your imagination to roam. Keep your cats wild for as long as you can so that you can regard them with as clear an eye as possible.

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