A Boy and a Girl with a Cat and an Eel is a 1635 oil painting by Judith Leyster that is now in the National Gallery, London.

[1] This moralistic interpretation is supported, Cynthia Kortenhorst-Von Bogendorff Rupprath says, by the eye contact with the viewer made by the little girl in the painting as she wags her finger.

[2] Leyster's husband, Jan Miense Molenaer, included such an image in his group portrait "The Ruychaver-van der Laen Family" (c. 1629–30) in which a boy holding a clawing cat by the tail torments a girl by dangling it near her; she shies away tending to her scratched hand.

[2] Some scholars have also interpreted the eel being held as a kat aal or cat-eel, which were fed to cats as they were not worth eating.

There are other examples of Dutch paintings as well as poems, such as Jacob Cats in his introductory section of his book Kinderspel or Children's Games, which use children as a motif both to mock and to preach morals to adults, and Frima Fox Hofrichter says this painting falls into that category.