A Victorian artist and avid bird-watcher banished cats from his country cottage, but soon wished he hadn’t.
Harrison Weir was a Victorian artist, engraver and illustrator who specialised in drawing animals, especially songbirds. He was also mad about cats (in 1871 he organised the world’s first cat show) and assumed, naturally enough, that his two passions were incompatible. He discovered, however, that he could not have been more wrong.
Victorian cat-lover Harrison Weir launches into his favourite subject, but finds his audience growing restive.
On the eve of the world’s first Cat Show, held in 1871 at the Crystal Palace in London, organiser Harrison Weir was frankly boring a friend with his flights of ecstasy on cats. Just when the argument seemed lost, a happy inspiration struck him.