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<p>In Jean de La Fontaine's seventeenth-century fable, which this painting illustrates, a cunning monkey persuades a cat to retrieve roasting chestnuts from a fire. The term "cat's paw," meaning a person unwittingly duped by another, derives from this tale.
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Numerous engraved and painted precedents for the brutality of Landseer's interpretation existed in the work of seventeenth-century Dutch and British illustrators of La Fontaine. The fabulist's symbolic use of animals to describe the tribulations of human existence became popular among nineteenth-century romantic painters and satirists.</div>
<bdi><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Edwin_Landseer" class="extiw" title="w:en:Edwin Landseer"><span title="English painter (1802-1873)">Edwin Landseer</span></a>
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circa 1824 <div style="display: none;">date QS:P571,+1824-00-00T00:00:00Z/9,P1480,Q5727902</div>
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