With its fresh harmony of pinks and greens, its delicate treatment of the young woman’s profile, and its strangely feral, rodent-like cat, this picture earns the title assigned to it by an early print publisher: “Les Caresses dangeureuses.” François Boucher was the eighteenth century’s great painter of women, particularly celebrated for blushing, sensuous nudes. Though his subject here might seem more demure, the association of cats with unruly female sexuality in eighteenth-century France, would have lent the scene a distinct erotic charge for contemporary viewers.