THE COLORFUL, DANCING, PSYCHEDELIC CATS OF LOUIS WAIN

By Alice Bucknell

Louis Wain, A Summer Tea Party. Courtesy of Chris Beetles Ltd.

Thanks to the the animators at Disney and Pixar, visual culture abounds with adorable critters that walk and talk just like we do. Yet it wasn’t until the late-19th century that such anthropomorphic animals were popularized, almost single-handedly, by a British illustrator named Louis Wain.

Celebrated today for psychedelic cat drawings—many of them produced while stationed in an insane asylum—Wain soared to the heights of feline fame during his earlier years for his ability to hold a furry mirror up to Victorian society, and later, the emerging bourgeois of the Edwardian era. The editor of Punch even referred to him as the “Hogarth of Cat Life.”

In Wain’s weird world, cats wine and dine, grin and wink, dress up and boogie down—“at once embodying all that was fun and stylish in Edwardian times,” suggests Chris Beetles, a London-based art dealer and leading Wain authority. “Back then, and now too, the English public were prepared to laugh at themselves more easily when presented with comic social disorder through animals.”

Wain’s intense personality, gifted observations, dramatic private life, and lifelong battle with mental illness combined to produce an iconic body of work—a “whole cat world,” as the science fiction writer H.G. Wells once remarked—that is comical at times and tragic at others, but never fails to reflect the absurdities of society.

Born in London during the summer of 1860 as the first of six children, Wain’s career traced the transition from the Victorian to Edwardian eras, when the growing middle class produced a culturally dynamic society for Wain to observe and critique within his fanciful illustrations. From an early age, the artist suffered from both physical and mental trauma that included recurring nightmares and “visions of extraordinary complexity,” according to Wain himself. After an unremarkable stint as a musician, but knowing he was destined to become an artist, Wain shifted to painting and illustration in his early twenties. 

In 1881, Wain found his first patron in Sir William Ingram, editor of The Illustrated London News, who commissioned the 21-year-old to produce a naturalistic illustration titled Bullfinches on the Laurels for The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. In 1884, Wain married his sister’s governess, Emily Richardson, but this happiness was short-lived: She died of cancer hardly three years later, but not before encouraging Wain to debut his first feline portrait of their kitten, Peter. The general reaction was less than enthusiastic, with one critic reportedly asking Wain: “Whoever would want to see a picture of a cat?”

Undeterred by this lukewarm reception, Wain’s big break finally came in 1886, when he was asked to illustrate the special holiday issue of the The Illustrated London News, known as A Kitten’s Christmas Party. Wain soared to fame overnight, and the era of his “cat world” began. Here, in what would become his signature anthropomorphic style, a gentleman tomcat sports a monocle while giving a sumptuous speech; elsewhere, a merry band of felines plays festive tunes while dancing their hearts out.

Wain’s cats only became more daring as his career blossomed. From the 1890s onward, action-packed panoramas would play host to fancy felines with “India rubber limbs and bodies, arranged as the picture demands, with a breathtaking disregard for accuracy,” explains Beetles.

Wain grew from being a mere illustrator and lover of cats to attain the nearly mythical status of a total feline expert: He was elected president of the National Cat Club in 1890 and hosted its annual cat show each year in London. Despite that, Wain didn’t actually possess much proper knowledge about the animals he depicted; he was known to espouse various suspect theories, like his idea that striped tabby cats were comprised of magnets bound to the North Pole.

He was also a terrible businessman. Wain refused to hire an agent, selling his own paintings and illustrations directly instead. Wain’s shyness and inability to negotiate fees resulted in near-constant financial difficulties that plagued him throughout his life, which paradoxically worsened in his peak period of production.

Louis Wain, Love’s Labour’s Lost. Courtesy of Chris Beetles Ltd.

By 1907, Wain had oversaturated the market and was finding it nearly impossible to sell new work. The beginning of World War I led to further economic hardship and additional grief: With one sister dead in 1913 after several years spent in an insane asylum, Wain’s eldest sister died in 1915. The artist’s own delusions grew more sinister and violent as he became convinced that his other sisters were responsible for the elder one’s death.  ………………..

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