Louis Wain was a Victorian illustrator who made the cat a character. His cats played cards, sat through dinner parties and smoked, and he spent his last fifteen years in psychiatric hospitals. Today he is best known for a set of brightly patterned, almost electric cats said to chart his slide into schizophrenia.
In his drawings, cats had opinions, hobbies and a social life. H.G. Wells, whose statement backed an appeal for Wain in 1925, declared that English cats that did not look and live like Wain's cats were ashamed of themselves.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The famous story says the illness can be watched as it arrives. Line the pictures up, from the plump, well behaved tabby to the cat made of colored lightning, and a mind seems to come apart one picture at a time.
Nobody knows that order. In 1939 a psychiatrist named Walter Maclay came across eight pictures by Wain in a shop. They were undated, and he arranged them anyway, in what the Wellcome Collection calls an assumed chronological order, to argue that the artist's mind was deteriorating. The Wellcome Collection adds that there was no evidence to support that ordering.
So an image that decorates countless articles about genius and madness began as one doctor's guess about eight pictures from a shop. The man behind the pictures is a better reason to look twice.
What did Louis Wain draw for his dying wife?
A kitten, if the usual story is right. Wain was born in London in 1860, and when his father died suddenly, Louis was only twenty. He became the support of his mother and five unmarried sisters, a duty that lasted most of his life.
In 1884 he married Emily Richardson, who had been his sisters' governess, and the couple settled in Hampstead. A black and white kitten named Peter joined them there. The usual story says Wain drew it again and again to comfort Emily as she was dying, and he himself later said that Peter laid the foundation of his career as a cat artist. Emily died in January 1887, three years into the marriage.
Cats had not been his first subject. His first published drawing, in a sporting paper at Christmas 1881, showed bullfinches, and the caption called them robins. In 1884, encouraged by his wife, he sold his first cat drawings to the Illustrated London News, the paper where his cats would soon become a Christmas fixture.
What You'll Discover
How cats got a social life.
Who pulled him out of the ward.
What his last cats really looked like.
Whether the diagnosis holds up.