There is a high rolling cat lover somewhere in New York — one that paid several times the price of a fancy car in order to call the world's largest cat painting his or her own. Weighing 227 pounds and measuring 6-feet by 8.5-feet, "My Wife's Lovers" was painted by Austrian artist Carl Kahler around 1893 and features 42 cats, all of which had real-life counterparts belonging to the painting's commissioner, Kate Birdsall Johnson (who owned 350 cats total, by some reports). In the center of the work is Sultan, a cat who cost Johnson $3,000.
Sotheby's New York estimated earlier that the portrait would sell for around half a million dollars; on Tuesday, the anonymous buyer dwarfed those estimates by picking it up for $826,000.
Kahler's masterpiece now likely has a new claim to fame — the most expensive cat painting ever sold.
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