Cats have been a preferred subject of photographers for a very long time. Around the late 19th and early 20th century, cats appeared in thousands of photographs. Some creative photographers would dress up kittens and cats in costumes and pose them in order to see the pictures on postcards and in books.
So what’s the oldest cat photograph?
The short answer is that no one actually knows when the domestic cat was first photographed.
The very first permanent photograph was taken by a French scientist and inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Niépce took the world’s first photograph in 1826 or 1827 with a photo of the view from his studio in La Gras France by exposing a bitumen-covered zinc plate for eight hours.
Oldest photographs of a cat
The oldest photographs showing a cat currently in existence dates to sometime between 1840 to 1860.
Harvard University has a daguerreotype photograph of a tabby cat with white mittens drinking water from a white bowl that is believed to be one of the oldest photo of a cat.
The photograph is estimated to have been taken sometime between 1840 and 1860 by an unknown photographer.
This daguerreotype also dates from between 1840 and 1860 and shows an unidentified man sitting with a tabby cat in his lap.
Daguerreotype photography required subjects to sit still for at least a few seconds in order to capture a focused picture. The man is focused and clear in this photograph but the face of the cat is blurry as it would not have kept still for long enough.
This daguerreotype is the oldest photograph of a cat from the Library of Congress photograph collections.
The George Eastman Museum has a daguerreotype dated from 1850 of a blind man wearing dark glasses holding a cat.
These are the earliest known photographs taken of cats.
Web story: The oldest cat photography
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