Painting: SELF-PORTRAIT WITH JASPER by Sterling Strauser

The artist appears in outline. The cat gets all the paint.

Self-Portrait with Jasper is an oil on board by Sterling Strauser (1907-1995), from the United States, signed and dated 1970. Artists paint self-portraits to study themselves, and often because the model is free and close at hand. A black cat, presumably Jasper, sprawls across the foreground in thick, wet strokes, with pale eyes and pricked ears. Behind and above it, a man's face is drawn in a few thin lines on an ochre ground, little more than glasses and a tuft of hair. The image is fourteen inches wide. Framed, twenty-three and a half inches wide and twenty and a half high.

We know who ran that household.