Louis Wain's Cat Gallery
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FOUR SEASONS - SPRING

                   " Home Late"

Louis William Wain (1860 – 1939) was an English artist best known for his illustrations of anthropomorphised large-eyed cats and kittens. His illustrations showed cats playing musical instruments, serving tea, playing cards, fishing, smoking, and enjoying a night at the opera. Wain was a prolific artist, sometimes producing as many as several hundred drawings a year.

The son of a working-class English textile trader and French mother born in Clerkenwell in the summer of 1860, Wain suffered from nightmares – which he later described as “visions of extraordinary complexity” – from an early age. The oldest of six children and the only boy, his sensitive disposition and hare lip meant that doctors gave orders that he shouldn’t attend school until the age of ten. A naturally gifted artist, he was eccentric even as a youth, claiming to have harnessed electricity from the ether which meant he was regularly pursued down the street by a giant ball of energy. Socially isolated, he was forced to face up to his responsibilities at 20, on the death of his father.

By 1907 Wain's popularity began to decline and he returned from a stint in New York broke, after his mother had died of Spanish influenza while he was abroad. His mental instability also began around this time, and increased gradually over the years. He had always been considered quite charming but odd, and often had difficulty in distinguishing between fact and fantasy. Others frequently found him incomprehensible, and his mode of speaking tangential. His behavior and personality changed, and he began to suffer from delusions, with the onset of schizophrenia. Whereas he had been a mild-mannered and trusting man, he became hostile and suspicious, particularly towards his sisters. He claimed that the flickering of the cinema screen had robbed the electricity from their brains. He began wandering the streets at night, rearranging furniture within the house, and spent long periods locked in his room writing incoherently.

Louis Wain Cats Dancing Around A May Pole

FOUR SEASONS - SPRING

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." ~ Albert Schweitzer

     

Louis Wain illustrated about one hundred children's books, and his work appeared in papers, journals, and magazines, including the Louis Wain Annual, which ran from 1901 to 1915. His work was also regularly reproduced on the picture postcards, and these are highly sought after by collectors today. In 1898 and 1911 he was chairman of the National Cat Club.
 

When his sisters could no longer cope with his erratic and occasionally violent behaviour, he was finally committed in 1924 to a pauper ward of Springfield Mental Hospital in Tooting.

Wain's illustrations often parody human behaviour, satirizing fads and fashions of the day. He wrote, "I take a sketch-book to a restaurant, or other public places, and draw the people in their different positions as cats, getting as near to their human characteristics as possible. This gives me doubly nature, and these studies I think [to be] my best humorous work."

A year later, he was discovered there and his circumstances were widely publicized, leading to appeals from such figures as H. G. Wells and the personal intervention of the Prime Minister. Wain was transferred to the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Southwark, and again in 1930 to Napsbury Hospital near St Albans in Hertfordshire, north of London.

This hospital was relatively pleasant, with a garden and colony of cats, and he spent his final 15 years there in peace. While he became increasingly deluded, his erratic mood swings subsided, and he continued drawing for pleasure. His work from this period is marked by bright colors, flowers, and intricate and abstract patterns, though his primary subject remained the same.

""Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods.
Cats have never forgotten this. - Anonymous

A cat's eyes are windows enabling us to see into another world." - Irish Legend 

"I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul." --Jean Cocteau

"If you, like me, were made of 
fur and sun warmed you, like me, you'd purr." --Karla Kuskin

"A cat determined not to be found can fold itself up like a pocket handkerchief if it wants to.""

"Any cat who misses a mouse pretends it was aiming for the dead leaf.""