Ink on paper, framed. Featuring Felix the Cat on the sailboat. Signed Pat Sullivan on the lower right corner. Attributed to Pat Sullivan (1885-1933, American-Australian). Picture size: 18 x 19 cm (7.1 x 7.5 inches), frame size: 26.5 x 30 cm (10.4 x 11.8 inches). PROVENANCE: Southern Ontario estate

Patrick Peter "Pat" Sullivan (1885-1933) was an Australian-American cartoonist, pioneer animator, and film producer best known for producing the first Felix the Cat silent cartoons. Sullivan was born in Paddington, New South Wales, the second son of Patrick Sullivan, an immigrant from Ireland and his Sydney-born wife Margaret, née Hayes. Around 1909, Sullivan left Australia and spent a few months in London, England, before moving to the United States around 1910. He worked as assistant to newspaper cartoonist William Marriner and drew four strips of his own. When Marriner died in 1914, Sullivan joined the new animated cartoon studio set up by Raoul Barre. In 1915, Sullivan was fired by Barre for general incompetence. In 1916, William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, set up a studio to produce animated cartoons based on his paper's strips and hired Barre's best animators. Sullivan decided to start his own studio and made a series called ‘Sammy Johnsin’ based on a Marriner strip on which he had worked. As Mickey Mouse was gaining popularity among theatre audiences through sound cartoons by late 1928, Sullivan, after years of refusing to convert Felix to sound, finally agreed to use sound in Felix's cartoons. Unfortunately, Sullivan did not carefully prepare this process and put sound in cartoons that the studio had already completed. By 1930, Felix had faded from the screen. Sullivan relented in 1933, and announced that Felix would return in sound, but died that year before production began. By the early 1930s, Sullivan's alcoholism had completely consumed him. According to artist George Cannata, Sulivan would often fire employees in a drunken haze, not remembering the next day, when they would return to work as if nothing had happened. According to Shamus Culhane, Sullivan artist Al Eugster recalled that Sullivan was "[t]he most consistent man in the business - consistent in that he was never sober". According to Otto Messmer, Sullivan drank all day long and was never in a sound enough state of mind to contribute creatively to the cartoons he produced. In later years, much of Sullivan's staff was interviewed and claimed Messmer deserved all credit for the Felix character's creation and development, arguing that Sullivan was too sick to contribute or even really run the studio.

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