Cats Became High Profile but Dogs Are Not Forgotten

Herman Maril, my father, is known for his seascapes, interiors and landscapes.

Also of note are a number of his paintings primarily focusing on our family cats.

His large, vertical interior cat painting entitled, Tranquility is in the permanent collection of the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C.

Interior With Cat, which is owned by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, was borrowed by Walter Mondale when he was vice president, and hung in his office.

The painting of a cat stretched out, sleeping on a radiator in our family’s Baltimore house, entitled Languid Cat, has been in several national retrospectives. Poster prints of this artwork are sold in a number of museum stores around the country.

My sister, Nadja Maril Crilly, wrote two children’s books focused on Molly Midnight, one of our family’s black cats in the 1970s. The books are illustrated with my father’s cat paintings.

Sometimes people who are familiar with my father’s work will ask me why he was so much of a cat lover but didn’t seem to care about dogs.

The truth is he actually had been more of a dog lover through the first half of his life and never really had much interest in cats until his middle-age years, when he was raising a family.

While we do have a few examples of cat paintings from early in my father’s career, these are small sized paintings and do not make cats the center of attention.

The Road, from 1939, is dominated by an interesting looking tree. A tiny cat in the painting is a secondary object.

Cafe, another example from 1939, shows the interior of a bar with the focus on a man sitting alone, rather somberly, at a table. He is looking down, staring at the floor, while finishing off a drink. He seems down on his luck. Adding to his woes is a black cat walking past his table headed for the exit door. You get the impression that things have not been going well and they continue to get worse with the superstitions of a black cat crossing  his path.

Our first family pet was a beagle. With me being David, my parents thought it was appropriate to name the puppy Goliath.

However, David and Goliath never quite got their acts together.

Because I was only a few years old, still learning to pronounce words and talk, I could not say, “Goliath.” Instead, I called the dog “Golly.”

That became the name he answered to.

While my parents said he had been the runt of his litter, they had selected him because he won them over with his shy but engaging personality.

Golly grew into a terrific family pet. He was a bit larger than most beagles and had  a few more black markings than a purebred. Still, like beagles, he had a friendly personality and, with a bellowing bark much larger than his size, was a solid watchdog.

Golly grew up in the days when cities like Baltimore did not have leash laws. There wasn’t as much traffic and in Mt. Washington, the suburban neighborhood that we lived in, it was safe to have a dog run loose.

Golly would stick to his his daily routines, running around the neighborhood, knocking over garbage cans, and having his share of favorite snacks before coming home for dinner.

Over the years Golly appeared in several paintings. One, entitled Resting, from 1955, was given to me as a kid by by my father and it’s always hung in a place of honor wherever I’ve lived.

Golly was the lone pet star of the show until my mother, Esta Maril, decided my sister should have a kitten when she was six years old. My mother had numerous cats and dogs growing up and she felt it was time for us to add a kitten to the household.

We summered in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, and she told Phil Alexander, one of our close neighborhood friends, we were looking for a kitten. Phil knew just about everyone in town and it only took him a few days to complete the mission.

A few mornings later, while we were eating breakfast, there was a knock at the door and Phil, tossed a gray tabby kitten, about three months old, into the house.

My sister named her Silky.

Except for my mother, we were extremely inexperienced and nervous over integrating a dog and cat living together under the same roof.

We started off with a firm commitment to keeping the animals separate. There was a tremendous fear that they would instantly begin fighting and become mortal enemies if they were together.

Through much of her first summer, Silky spent most of her time in my father’s studio, which was upstairs in the back of the house. He added a screen door between the studio and my parents’ bedroom so that there wouldn’t be any danger of the dog invading the studio or the cat running out.

As a result, the cat spent much of her time with my father while he was at work, painting.

Slowly, he grew intrigued by Silky’s very serene, quiet and graceful demeanor. In contrast to Golly, who was quite sloppy, she was like a finely crafted piece of moving sculpture.

By the end of the summer, a cat or two began appearing in a few pages of my father’s sketchbooks. And then it wasn’t long before Silky showed up in a painting.

Fortunately Silky and Golly worked out their social relationships on their own. I think they both figured it could be months or years before we had the nerve to let them hang out together.

They definitely had been aware of each other.

Occasionally someone would carry the cat into the regular part of the house with the dog there. Or the dog might be brought into the studio briefly but he would be closely chaperoned and supervised.

Silky, in contrast to Golly, was allowed to run loose outside. And there was one comical scene where the dog was being walked on a leash while the cat was  on top of our front yard’s thick hedges, looking down at him.

But when fall came and the family migrated back to Baltimore for the school year, the two took matters into their own paws.

One day, by accident, one of us left a door open and the cat walked out into the rest of the house.

Suddenly the two of them were together.

Much to our surprise, there were no growls, yowls or fights.

Bit by bit we let them spend more time together and soon they were left unsupervised without any problems.

Over the years our roster of engaging and friendly cats included Molly Midnight, Little, Captain Midnight and Sampson Smarty Puss. They all had unique personalties and quirks. Several were black.

Our second dog was a Labrador Retriever named Skipper. He grew up surrounded by cats and always got along with his different feline partners. He even copied some of their mannerisms, learning to lick-wash his paws and fur like a fastidious cat.

It’s true that cats were more prevalent than dogs in my father’s later artwork. One of the cats became, only for my father, a retriever, fetching little crumpled pieces of paper or cellophane he rolled up into a ball, and would throw.

Still, he also remained a dog person.

However, in retrospective, the animal that probably drew the most of his attention in paintings were horses.

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