A bizarre cat lover or a perplexed artist?
Hello to all the lovely creatures out there!
Today I would like to discuss with you about an artist that I find absolutely intriguing and it's non other than Louis Wain. You might be familliar with the name, or not, that's alright cause we are going to dive right into his life!
Louis Wain was a British artist best known for his bizarre paintings and prints of anthropomorphized cats playing golf or having tea. He was born on August 5, 1860, in London and studied at the West London School of Art. Many of Wain’s works were featured in journals of the time including Illustrating Sporting and Dramatic News and the Illustrated London News.
Wain’s obsession with cats stemmed from an emotionally intense period of his life. His wife Emily Richardson, had become ill soon after their marriage in 1883 and Louis began drawing their cat, Peter, to help cheer her up. These drawings brought Emily great happiness and she encouraged her husband to publish them. Sadly she died before she could celebrate the great successes of his career, in January 1887. The reason that his cat paintings became so famous was that he presented them with great warmth and character, in a way that had seldom been done before. He began selling his illustrations to The Illustrated London News.
Peter was the subject of Wain’s first cat drawings and the impetus to his later work. Wain later said of Peter, who had been a stray, ‘to him, properly, belongs the foundation of my career, the developments of my initial efforts, and the establishing of my work.’
Until then cats were not popular in Victorian England, that favored dogs' loyalty to the suspicious nature of felines associated with witches and spinsters. Cats were also related with pests and the lower world so they weren't particularly fond by the people, until Wain changed that. Unfortunately, he was not cut out to be a businessman and did not copyright any of his images. He would sell his pictures, which he created quickly, for an outright fee and not get paid for any reproductions. Despite the continued popularity of his work, he struggled to make ends meet while supporting his unmarried sisters and eventually descended into poverty.
Sadly, Wain also suffered with mental health problems throughout his life and these worsened after the death of his wife. It is thought that he may have been suffering from schizophrenia as well as anxiety and depression. There are several different theories surrounding this diagnosis. As a child Wain had experienced terrifying and recurring vivid nightmares, and at school he was a dreamer, often playing truant to ramble the streets of London in an endless search for the great unknown.
Although Wain was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia, there is debate over this diagnosis today. A collector who was searching for the work of artists suffering from mental illnesses, in 1939 came across eight pictures by Louis Wain in a shop, which he arranged in an assumed chronological order to demonstrate the progression of the schizophrenic mind. His theory was that as the sequence of cat illustrations became more fragmented, so the artist’s mental state had too deteriorated. Thanks in part to the chart depicting his ‘dissolving cats’ found in a ‘Psychotic Art’ book in the 1960s his art has been inextricably linked with psychology.
The debate continues as, some point to a deterioration of his style due to his mental condition getting worse as he aged, but there is no proof of this theory in dated art – it may simply have been different experimentations in style. Even in his advanced age, Wain drew realistic cats, not just the frazzled psychedelic ones he is famed for. Others argue that his continued skill in drawing speaks more to his potentially being autistic or neurodivergent rather than to the original diagnosis of schizophrenia. Perhaps, rather than representing an internal psychosis, cats disintegrating into pattern or transforming into three-dimensional Cubist designs demonstrated something positive. This could be an increasing creative confidence, evidence of enjoying new techniques, or expressing something about the radically changing world in which the artist found himself.
In any case, the series of drawings, now known as ‘Kaleidoscope Cats’, became a popular visual example of the schizophrenic mind. Long gone was the Edwardian interpretation of Wain’s work as ‘charming’ and ‘humorous’. Instead, his art was often presented as ‘psychotic’ or ‘disturbed’, both words used in a major exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1972.
The ‘Kaleidoscope Cats’ concept does not allow space to acknowledge or appreciate the natural evolution of Wain’s artistic practice, nor does it reflect the complexity of his personality and life experiences. Much like his cats, which could be cheeky, dark, witty, charming, vulnerable, sweet, silly, wonderfully bizarre and more, Louis Wain’s life and work deserves a wide-ranging interpretation that stretches far beyond ‘psychotic’ or ‘tortured artist’.
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