World’s Largest Cat Painting Sells for $826000

Sotheby’s in New York announced the painting, My Wife’s Lovers by Austrian artist Carl Kahler, sold Monday morning for the staggering sum after first going on display Friday at the auction house on a wall specially constructed for the oversized piece. Instead he met millionaire art collector Kate Johnson.

Carl Kahler’s 1891 painting My Wife’s Lovers-which rose to Internet prominence recently-sold on November 3 at Sotheby’s 19th Century European Art sale for $826,000, more than two times its estimated price of $300,000. Now, Mrs. Johnson actually was very wealthy.

The final work, which weighed a whopping 227 pounds and came in at 6-by-8.5 feet, is believed to be the biggest painting of cats ever. A few newspapers report that she had 350 cats.

Johnson, “possibly America’s greatest cat enthusiast”, according to Sotheby’s, wrote in her will that $500,000 was to go to the “perpetual care and comfort” of her cats, Sotheby’s said. And then in and around 1893, he does their portrait. Judging by her feline choices in terms of painting and pet, it wouldn’t be completely wrong to conclude she was a cat lady.

When Kahler, who was best known as a painter of horse racing scenes, was commissioned to complete the work in the late 1800s, he had never painted a single cat in his life.