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His feline fantasies drove him insane, but now a new exhibition in London celebrates his genius
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Based on the article by Clare Smales in The Mail on Sunday.
The name of Louis Wain may not be instantly familiar, but the way he painted and drew cats with such human expressions and emotions
has totally changed our perceptions of them.
Born in 1860 in London’s Clerkenwell district, with a harelip, and avoided by his school fellows, Louis Wain played truant and roamed the London streets far from his home.
He fell in love with Emily Richardson, the governess to the youngest of his five sisters and brought scandal and ostracism by his family when they set up home in Hampstead, North London.
They were blissfully happy. He was eking out a living travelling to dog shows around the country, selling his sketches to the Illustrated Sporting News. But Emily became bedridden with breast cancer and died three years later, just as, thanks to her, the struggling artist was becoming well known.
It was for Emily’s amusement, that Louis did many sketches of their black and white kitten, and it was she who encouraged him to submit his picture “A Kitten’s Christmas Party” to the Illustrated London News. Requestsfor his cat pictures came flooding in and his love of cats grew into a passion.
Because of Wain's pictures cats replaced dogs as the nations number one pet, and his ability to look deep into the feline psyche and convey in his paintings their special quality made his work much sought after. But he paid a heavy price, and his obsession eventually drove him mad. He was certified insane in 1924 and locked away in an asylum.
He had by then fallen back into obscurity and was committed to a paupers ward in Tooting, until admirers of his work, including The Prime Minister of the day, Ramsey MacDonald, Princess Alexandra and
H.G. Wells heard of his plight. They contributed to a fund which paid for a room of his own in the beautiful surroundings of Napsbury Hospital near St. Albans, where he died, aged 78, drawing apparently happy, to the end.
The current interest in his work is phenomenal and the prices of his pictures has risen to £15,000. This week his biography by Rodney Dale is reprinted in a glossy new colour edition, and the “Summer Cat Show” opens at the Chris Beetles Gallery, in St James’s, London. If you can’t get to the exhibition, you can see some of
Louis Wain’s fascinating work on this page.
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The After Dinner Speaker
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His life was one of torment and mental anguish, yet from his brush came paintings so human, they changed the fortune of cats forever.
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The Master of Cat College
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He said in 1909: "When I first took to painting cats, they were despised animals. The man who took an interest in the cat movement was looked upon as effeminite."
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The Colonel
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Wain's admirers can chart his mental instability in his works - the early naturalistic ones, the strange anthropomorphic fantasies and the last ones where as Chris Beetles says, 'the cats dissolve into a kaleidescope of colours and patterns.'
Perhaps, most revealing, is an incident which occurred in 1917. Wain was boarding a London bus when it swerved to avoid a cat, throwing the artist onto the road. Recovering from concussion in hospital, Wain's first words on regaining consciousness were: 'The cat, the cat! Is the cat all right?'
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