Ginger Long-Haired Cat Sunbathing on Parlor Rug, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Ginger Long-Haired Cat Sunbathing on Parlor Rug, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Ginger Long-Haired Cat Sunbathing on Parlor Rug, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-6E40FB

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Sometime in the 1950s, a long-haired ginger-and-cream cat found the one rectangle of window sunlight falling across a woven parlor rug and arranged itself inside it with the precision of someone who had been tracking that patch all morning. The rug beneath it — the kind of floral-medallion weave that furnished middle-class American living rooms for three decades running — suggests a household that took its domestic arrangements seriously, which the cat did not.

Someone in that household decided this was worth a photograph, which was a more deliberate act in the 1950s than it later became. You loaded the camera, you framed the shot, you made a choice. The choice here was a sleeping cat, which tells you something about the afternoon and the people in it.

The cat has tucked its face into its own chest with the completeness of an animal that has solved every problem it was ever going to have. It was probably named something like Butterscotch.

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