The bad new for mice is that cats, their traditional foes, feature far more often in paintings. Mice, being more inconspicuous, seldom earn their place in the foreground. This article looks at some of the few paintings that feature these small rodents.
Mice have long been popular with children, to the chagrin of many mothers who’d rather not have the little creatures munching their food at night and leaving their droppings around their kitchen – mice, that is, not children. Accordingly, they feature in many children’s stories, including the folk tale of Cinderella.
John Everett Millais’ portrait of Cinderella from 1881 shows a young girl sat in her working dress, clutching a broomstick with her left hand, and with a peacock feather in her right. She has a wistful expression, staring into the distance almost, but not quite, in the direction of the viewer. The only other cue to the underlying story is the mouse seen at the bottom left.
At the start of his career, when he was only 21, Gustav Klimt was influenced by Hans Makart and his classicist style and motifs. In 1883, Klimt painted an academic nude surrounded by some of Aesop’s fabulous creatures, in his Fable. These visual references to Aesop’s Fables include a sleeping lion, white mice, storks, and a fox, but he refrained from building them into narrative.
One of Paul Ranson’s earliest paintings, made in 1885 before he had left Limoges and joined the Nabis, is his curious Vanity of Mice. Influenced by both vanitas and his interest in witchcraft, three black mice scurry over some books of arcane knowledge, with a skull and globe behind.
Mice are more the scale of the objects gathered in still life paintings, and appear in several.
Clara Peeters, one of the early masters of the genre, employed symbols of vanitas in her undated Still Life Of Flowers In a Roemer With a Field Mouse And An Ear Of Wheat, building on the association between field mice and grain.
Painted in 1804, Johann Amandus Winck’s magnificent still life of Flowers and Fruits on a Stone Ledge with Butterflies and Mice makes good use of two butterflies, a housefly (perhaps as another vanitas reference), a mouse and a snail.
Finally, several painters have also illustrated natural history books, including more biologically faithful depictions of species of mouse.
Edward Adrian Wilson’s illustration of the Dormouse is one of his high quality works made for an account of the mammals of Britain published in 1910. The following year, he was one of Captain Scott’s chosen team to make their attempt to reach the South Pole. When they arrived there on 18 January 1912, they discovered that Roald Amundsen’s team had beaten them to it by five weeks. The five men then attempted to return, but some time after 29 March, Wilson died alongside Scott, 148 miles (238 km) from their destination, base camp. Sometimes the story is in the artist and not their art.