Charming portrait of a basketful of kittens, all focused on a ball of string. Oil on canvas, signed lower left: Brunel Neuville. Alfred Arthur Brunel de Neuville is known for figure, landscape, still life and animal painting. After his basic education, de Neuville studied fine art with his father, a well-known teacher of landscape and still-life painting in Paris. In 1879, at the age of twenty-seven, he exhibited his first painting at the Salon de Paris, which was a simple and elegant study of apples and raisins. It was definitely within the growing French fascination with the new style of Realism where details, textures, volumes and the sense of objects through acute observation of their appearance became the subject matter of the work of art. His first sentimental painting of playful kittens and domestic pets, another de Neuville trademark, followed in 1880, causing a great popular and commercial success for the painter. Overall size: 29 x 33 1/2 in. Sight size: 20 x 26 in. Please note that all sales are final. No refunds will be given under any circumstances.