The Cat: 3500 Years of the Cat in Art Hardcover – 2 Sept. 2011

An absolute gem of a book. Informative, large beautiful images of the work. Quite outstanding.

intelligent, scrupulously researched, outstanding anthology acts as painlessly educational history of art and survey of a huge spectrum of attitudes towards and attachments to our most ubiquitous domestic animal companion.

Lovely book, saw it at the RA but much cheaper here. If you like cats and or art, then this is the book to have. Lovely prints of cats through the ages from ancient China to the present day. A pleasing purchase.

This beautifully presented book was given as a gift to a cat lover who was delighted, wonderful pictures and illustrations.

Absolutely fantastic book! Very nice photos and descriptions. The book is even more informative and illustrated than I expected. Thanks a lot!

Superb large format art book, beautifully printed and designed, very well researched and highly interesting historically. Many of the art works which are well printed and of generous size are relatively unfamiliar, and extremely well chosen. The author has also managed to find a high proportion of female artists to include, which is unusual in itself. I have no criticisms of the book other than a subjective opinion, which is that the section on "big cats" is not really relevant to the subject, and the valuable space it takes up could have been better used for even more depictions of the book's real subject, the domestic cat in art . Wonderful book, a great gift and a book for reference as well as pleasure.

I was given 3500 Years of the Cat In Art for a birthday present. I only mention this because it's not the sort of book I'd have thought of buying myself, so it was a delightful surprise to discover how good it was. I thought I'd probably just flick through it, because the illustrations are certainly beautiful, but there's a really interesting introduction that discusses the cat in its historical and cultural context and made me keen to read the rest of the text as well as admire the pictures. Subsequent chapters don't just take you on a trot through the history of the cat in art, they focus on themes such as The Comic Cat, The Portrait Cat and The Eastern Cat.Obviously cat fanatics will love it, and cat AND art obsessives will have a ball - but I'm neither so I really recommend it to the more general reader too.