Mme. Ronner has invented a method of posing cats that is ingenious and of great advantage.  To the uninitiated it would seem that one could only take the portrait of a sleeping cat, so untiring are the little beasts in their gymnastic performances.  But Mme. Ronner, having studied them with infinite patience, proceeded to arrange a glass box, in which, on a comfortable cushion, she persuades her cats to assume the positions she desires.  This box is enclosed in a wire cage, and from the top of this she hangs some cat attraction, upon which the creature bounds and shows those wonderful antics that the artist has so marvellously reproduced in her painting.  Mme. Ronner has two favorite models, “Jem” and “Monmouth.”  The last name is classical, since the cat of Mother Michel has been made immortal.

Miss Winslow, in “Concerning Cats,” says that “Mme. Ronner excels all other cat painters, living or dead.  She not only infuses a wonderful degree of life into her little figures, but reproduces the shades of expression, shifting and variable as the sands of the sea, as no other artist of the brush has done.  Asleep or awake, her cats look to the” felinarian “like cats with whom he or she is familiar.  Curiosity, drowsiness, indifference, alertness, love, hate, anxiety, temper, innocence, cunning, fear, confidence, mischief, earnestness, dignity, helplessness—­they are all in Mme. Ronner’s cats’ faces, just as we see them in our own cats.”

It is but a short time ago that Mme. Ronner was still painting in Brussels, and had not only cats, but a splendid black dog and a cockatoo to bear her company, while her son is devoted to her.  Her house is large and her grounds pleasant, and her fourscore years did not prevent her painting several hours a day, and, like some other ladies of whom we know, she was “eighty years young.”

The editor of the Magazine of Art, M. H. Spielman, in an article on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1903, writes:  “What the dog is to Mr. Riviere, to Madame Ronner is the cat.  With what unerring truth she records delightful kittenly nature, the feline nobility of haughty indifference to human approval or discontent, the subtlety of expression, and drawing of heads and bodies, the exact quality and tone of the fur, the expressive eloquence of the tail!  With all her eighty years, Madame Ronner’s hand, vision, and sensibility have not diminished; only her sobriety of color seems to have increased.”  Her pictures of this year were called “The Ladybird” and “Coaxing.”  To the Exhibition of the Beaux-Arts in Brussels, 1903, Mme. Ronner sent pictures of cats, full of life and mischief.

ROOSENBOOM, MARGARITE VOGEL. Second-class medal, Munich, 1892.  Born in 1843 and died in 1896, near The Hague.  She spent a large part of her life near Utrecht, devoting herself mainly to the painting of flowers.  One of her works is in the Royal Museum at Amsterdam, and another in the Museum at Breslau.