Franz Hegi was a draughtsman and etcher, who specialised in Swiss landscapes and costume studies, produced between 1809 and the early 1820’s, mainly in aquatint and hand-coloured.

This print (ex collection J E Herings, ex Lugt) is after Gottfreid Mind (Berne 1768 -1814 Berne), known as Der Katzenraphael (the Raphael of Cats), who was described as being of a “weak constitution”, inarticulate and illiterate, but was brilliant at drawing cats. As a child he had befriended a visiting artist, C H Legel, who taught him the rudiments of drawing, though Mind senior, a joiner, discouraged this activity and gave his son pieces of wood to carve instead.

At the age of fourteen his father sent him to live with the artist Sigmund Freudenberger, who taught Mind to colour etchings. An anonymous journalist later wrote that from this moment “until the time of his death, there is nothing to tell of him except that he spent his whole life on the self-same stool”.

After Freudenberger’s death, Mind had the time to paint his own watercolours, which began to attract notice, and which Frau Freudenberger sold. He followed Freudenberger in painting peasant life, widening his focus to children playing and studies of animals. Cats became his favourite theme. His watercolour drawings of cats were so popular that after his death they were variously reproduced as prints, in etching, as here, by Franz Hegi and others, and in lithography by Joseph Brodtmann, and others.

This print, by Hegi after after Gottfreid Mind, is on wove. It has a faint tiny foxmark in the centre of the top plate bevel, and other minor defects in the margins. It is one of several cat engravings after Mind in my current stock.