The cat's owner, Kevin Rudd, sits poised with a pen in hand and a thought to share.
This is how Australia's 26th prime minister will be reflected to Parliament House visitors for decades to come.
His official portrait, unveiled almost 10 years after he held the top job, joins 28 other former prime ministers in the parliamentary collection.
Current and former Labor ministers, US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy, deputy opposition leader Sussan Ley and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese attended the portrait's unveiling.
Mr Rudd, appointed Australia's ambassador to the US this year, was flanked by his wife Therese Rein, daughter Jessica, son Marcus and two of his three grandchildren.
He told the crowd the portrait almost didn't happen.
"Frankly, I've always pushed to one side having this stuff done (and) the directors of the parliamentary collection became so exasperated that they got to the point of threatening to get anybody to do a knock-up job based on my official photograph," he said.
"Vanity ultimately prevailed and I decided to yield to having an official portrait done."
The image, by Australian-British contemporary portrait painter Ralph Heimans, captures Mr Rudd's home, his achievements as prime minister, and his life post-politics.
Mr Heimans has previously painted members of the royal family, including the late Queen Elizabeth II, as well as cultural icons such as Margaret Atwood and Dame Judi Dench.
Mr Rudd's picture is the artist's first portrait of a prime minister and took about four years to complete.
Mr Heimans said parliament's official portraits of former prime ministers are portals to a moment in Australian history and their contributions to public life.
"It's the artist's responsibility to come up with a single image to capture the essence of that, and in terms of legacy that's a big responsibility," he said.
A major question was whether to set the portrait of Mr Rudd in the past, clean-shaven, or present-day with his "Hemingway beard".
Mr Heimans visited Mr Rudd's London home and saw his study filled floor-to-ceiling with books, sets of Chinese vases and an extensive collection of tea cups, all of which made their way into the final portrait.
The artist later spent a week at the Rudd family home in Queensland.
"There I saw Kevin at work, continuing to write, continuing to promote the causes he believed in and conceding that he was in the process of still developing these things," Mr Heimans said.
"That is the Kevin I decided to represent."
Three Indigenous totems in the background pay tribute to the national apology to Stolen Generations, the first order of business for the Rudd government.
Louis, the family cat, consistently interrupted the portrait sitting and Mr Heimans decided he too should be represented.
He doubles as an ode to the now deceased Jasper, the "first feline" who lived in The Lodge during Mr Rudd's prime ministership.
Mr Heimans said there was no "symbolic program" for either the cat or the chessboard.
"Don't interpret anything you see in any other political way," he told the crowd.
But he later admitted nothing was chosen by accident.
"For painters, given all the time it takes to produce a work, everything is very purposeful and deliberate in the end," Mr Heimans said.
Mr Rudd said his expression had been chosen by the artist for people to interpret in their own way.
"What appealed to me was not having a huge noggin in the middle of a painting, as people sometimes do, and having something smaller with a more interesting set of surroundings," he said.
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