Louis William Wain (5 August 1860 – 4 July 1939) was an English artist best known for his drawings of anthropomorphised cats and kittens.
Wain was born in Clerkenwell, London. In 1881 he sold his first drawing and the following year gave up his teaching position at the West London School of Art to become a full-time illustrator. He married in 1884 but was widowed three years later. In 1890 he moved to the Kent coast with his mother and five sisters, and, except for three years spent in New York, remained there until the family returned to London in 1917. In 1914, he suffered a severe head injury in a horse-drawn omnibus accident and ten years later was certified insane. He spent the remaining fifteen years of his life in mental hospitals, where he continued to draw and paint. Some of his later abstract paintings have been seen as precursors of psychedelic art.
Wain produced hundreds of drawings and paintings a year for periodicals and books, including Louis Wain’s Annual which ran from 1901 to 1921. His work also appeared on postcards and advertising, and he made brief ventures into ceramics and animated cartoons. In spite of his popularity and prolific output, Wain did not become wealthy, possibly because he sold his work cheaply and relinquished copyright, and also because he supported his mother and five sisters.
Cats in various styles from Wain’s later years.
“He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.” – Writer H. G. Wells said in a radio broadcast to support the 1925 appeal for Wain.
Wain was seen as a leading authority on cats, becoming president and chairman of the National Cat Club and serving as a judge in cat shows. He was also in demand by the growing number of organisations devoted to animal welfare. He was seen as responsible for raising the social status of cats, of taking them from the parlour to a position where even Members of Parliament could proudly announce their enthusiasm for them without fear of ridicule. In spite of his undoubted expertise, some of Wain’s theories on the breeding and nature of cats were seen as eccentric, just as were some of his ideas on philosophy and science.
Since Wain spent the last fifteen years of his life in mental hospitals, there has been speculation about his mental condition and suggestions that he was suffering from schizophrenia, with examples of his art appearing in several psychology text books in chapters covering the disorder. In 1939, a psychiatrist, Walter Maclay, found some paintings by Wain in a shop in Campden Hill and put them in a sequence that, he claimed, showed evidence of a deterioration in the artist’s mental state due to schizophrenia, even though the paintings were not dated. Maclay’s theory has been challenged as Wain was still producing paintings in his old style, as well as more abstract “kaleidoscopic” designs, while at Napsbury. Marking the centenary of Wain’s birth in The Guardian, cat expert Sidney Denham suggested that Wain’s breakdown had been triggered by his head injury, coming after a number of severe mental shocks.
In popular culture
Wain’s later work, where his cats dissolve into kaleidoscopic abstract patterns, has been identified as an important precursor to 1960s psychedelic art.
In 1972, the Victoria and Albert Museum devoted a major exhibition to Wain’s work.
Bibliography:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain
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