Austrian artist Carl Kahler's 1893 cat painting "My Wife's Lovers," thought to be the world's largest painting of cats, sold at a Sotheby's auction for $826,000. The cats in the painting belonged to San Francisco art collector Kate Johnson.
"(Kahler) was invited to her cat ranch (in 1881)," Polly Sartori, Sotheby's head of 19th century European paintings, told CBC News.
"Now, Mrs. Johnson actually was very wealthy. She was a millionaire and she had this giant mansion. Some newspapers report that she had 350 [cats]. So Carl Kahler meets Mrs. Johnson at the ranch, at the mansion, and she asks him if he would paint a portrait of her cats. So, for three years he spends time with the cats in the mansion doing sketches. And then in and around 1893, he does their portrait. He takes all of the sketches and he puts together this monumental-sized giant painting of 42 of her cats."
