Badly Painted Cats Artist Joke

This meme opens with a text dialogue between a client and an artist: the client asks the artist to paint him a cat, the artist asks 'A what?', the client asks if the artist even knows what a cat is, and the artist confirms he definitely does. The lower half of the meme is a 2x2 grid displaying four famous historically bad paintings of cats, all of which have bizarrely distorted anatomy, misshapen faces, and incorrect proportions that look nothing like a real cat. The joke is that despite the artist claiming he knows what a cat is, he clearly has no idea how to paint one correctly.

This meme compiles four well-known notoriously badly drawn cat paintings from medieval and early modern historical art into a joke format. It originates from a post by the WholesomeMeme account on X (formerly Twitter), which is the source cited. Bad historical cat paintings have been a popular running internet joke topic for many years.