Ginger Cats in Art

Ginger cats are almost always toms, nearly always characters, and on paper the most rewarding warm palette the atelier knows.

First the genetics, because they are too lovely to skip: the gene for the ginger coat sits on the X chromosome, and so the great majority of ginger cats are toms. The ginger queen exists — she needs the gene twice over — but she is a rarity. To say "the ginger tom" is, most of the time, simply to say: the ginger cat.

Character is granted to ginger toms generously: bold, affectionate, loud. Science keeps its reservations, but folk wisdom is decided — and after hundreds of portraits the atelier dares, cautiously, to nod along. An orange tom rarely looks modestly into the lens.

Orange is the one pigment that arrives already holding an opinion.

On the press, ginger is a celebration. Where a black coat asks for restraint, a ginger coat is allowed to glow: the tabby marking — the stripes and whorls almost every ginger cat carries — lends the portrait rhythm of its own, and pigment ink on cotton paper holds those warm tones at temperature for decades.

One printer’s tip for anyone photographing a ginger tom: avoid the full midday sun, which bleaches the coat to apricot. The golden hour — early evening, low light — does exactly what the name promises.

— the atelier