Miserable? Hardly! A celebration of ‘cat ladies’ through history – from Mary Pickford to Taylor Swift

To Vance, women who own cats and don’t have children are “miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made” and seek to spread that unhappiness to others. At other points in history, however, cats have conferred elegance and even status. The 18th-century French artist Jean-Baptiste Perronneau frequently painted his society subjects with feline companions to emphasise their refinement and sophistication. In this 1747 portrait of Magdaleine Pinceloup de la Grange, Perronneau depicts her with a chartreux, a rare French breed also favoured by the novelist Colette, the poet Charles Baudelaire and the former president Charles de Gaulle.