Tomy — a cat portrait in the astronomer’s manner · Commission No. 0005

Tomy is a cat, and No. 0005 is the first commission where the archetype was obvious before a single study had been made.

The archetype

The house rule is one archetype per sitter, and most of the work is deciding which one. Occasionally the photograph decides for you. Tomy arrived looking upward and slightly past the camera — the expression every cat owner recognises and no cat has ever been persuaded to repeat — and there is exactly one classical form built around a figure looking up and away from the viewer.

The astronomer is not a costume drama. It is a genuine portrait tradition: a sitter caught mid-observation, the light coming from an instrument rather than a window, the ground behind them given over to the thing they are looking at. Applied to an animal it does something the court portraits cannot. A grandee stares back at you. An astronomer is thinking about something else entirely, and lets you watch.

So the night sky is behind him, and it is his. That is the whole portrait.

The specification

Commission

No. 0005

Sitter

Tomy

Archetype

The Astronomer

Edition

The Portrait, 40 × 50 cm

Medium

Giclée on 400gsm museum canvas, stretched by hand

Finished in

Britain

The close

He was approved before printing, entered in the ledger at No. 0005, and his certificate carries the number and the archetype. Cats are supposed to be the difficult sitters in this trade. This one asked for the sky and was given it.