Liggende kat en een boom naast een hek c. 1864 - 1865

Maria Vos made this sketch of a cat, a tree, and a fence with pencil on paper. The work resides at the Rijksmuseum. Looking at this page from a sketchbook, we see a private moment, the record of an artist practicing her craft. But it is also a product of the Dutch art world of the 19th century. Vos was part of a generation of women who gained access to formal art training but were often confined to genres like still life and landscape. Sketchbooks like this offered a space for informal experimentation outside the male gaze. Note the contrast between the carefully observed cat and the more loosely rendered tree. Was Vos studying domestic animals as a safe subject matter? Or was she critiquing academic expectations through the intimate act of sketching? By researching the archives of art academies and exhibition records, we can learn more about the social conditions that shaped the art of Maria Vos and her contemporaries. The meaning of this modest sketch then shifts from the personal to the historical.