A moonlit assembly draws the eye first, not to a single figure, but to a congregation: a sea of cats, all rapt before a feline silhouette enthroned against the full moon. The painter’s choice to bathe the scene in yellow and indigo lends a theatrical hush, as if the city itself has paused to witness this nocturnal gathering. Each cat in the foreground is caught mid-gesture—alert, stretching, bristling with anticipation—while the rooftops and distant windmills recede into a misty, dreamlike Paris.

The composition leads the viewer’s gaze upward and inward, from the angular lines of the roofs to the luminous circle that crowns the central cat, transforming an ordinary alley into a stage for myth. Painted in 1885, Apothéose des chats belongs to a world where the boundaries between satire, observation, and fantasy blurred in the hands of artists like Théophile Alexandre Steinlen. The late nineteenth century in Paris was a time of cabarets, illustrated journals, and a fascination with the city’s marginalized creatures—none more so than the ubiquitous cat. Steinlen, famed for his posters and illustrations, often elevated the everyday into the iconic, and here he grants his feline subjects the grandeur of a royal court or a religious procession.

Though little is recorded about this particular work’s journey, its presence in the LeTemps.ch collection is a reminder of how images like this, playful yet monumental, captured the spirit of an age that reveled in both the comic and the mysterious. Stand before it long enough, and you may start to hear the city’s midnight chorus yourself.