Crackling flashes of color surround cat portraits that the famous British cat artist Louis Wain made at a later age. As if a cat had “put its paw in the socket,” that’s what a cat portrait sometimes looked like, according to the founder of the Museum of the Mind of Bethlem in Kent. Bethlem is a British institution for people with mental disorders, into which 70-year-old Wain was admitted in 1930. With the exhibition Animal Therapy: Louis Wain’s Cats he is now honored in that museum. And, handy in corona times: the exhibition is online also easy to visit virtually.
Louis Wain (1860-1939) became Britain’s most popular cat artist around 1900, with his humorous drawings of cats doing human things: making music, dining, sledding. His cat illustrations and picture postcards were widely circulated. How he, as a brother who had to support his five unmarried sisters, ended up in an institution as a penniless artist, can be seen in the recently released movie The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Doctor Strange) plays the eccentric artist, who, for example, thought that cats were ‘electric creatures’.
comfort kitten
Cats were not Wain’s subject at all at first. As an illustrator he drew all kinds of things, quickly with two hands. He married in 1883, but it soon became apparent that his wife had breast cancer. She took great comfort in a kitten they had brought home. To cheer her up, Wain taught the cat Peter tricks and sketched them. As a consolation, as a therapy for her. She urged him to publish those drawings, but he saw nothing in them. People loved dogs. Shortly before her death in 1887, when Wain became a widower at 27, he published them anyway. With great success. The public loved his cat parodies of British society. But because Wain was quite a business nerd, not arranging copyrights and clumsily investing, he was left short of money.
Wain became increasingly eccentric and confused after 1910, and was declared insane in 1924. He was put in an asylum for the poor. A journalist friend set up a fundraiser for him. Celebrities such as science fiction writer HG Wells, a Wain fan, supported the action. And so, thanks to his cat-drawing fans, Wain found himself in more luxurious establishments, such as Bethlem, where he could also draw.
The exhibition in the Bethlem Museum of the Mind shows dozens of cheerful cat drawings and paintings that he made in the asylum. You can virtually stand in front of it, and click on the text plates to readin the online version.
cat jesus
Sometimes the nursing staff asked Wain for drawings, for example around Christmas. There is a brightly colored cat Christmas scene in which a young kitten is held up with a halo, like a real cat Jesus. In a busy colorful decor. There you can clearly see how Wain developed from a commercial mainstream artist (there is also old printed work) to a freer, experimenting outsider artist.
Also read: The curls of the life of cat artist Louis Wain
Possibly inspired by his mother, who designed carpets, Wain went on to create paintings full of colorful geometric, decorative patterns, which sometimes resemble kaleidoscopic cat heads. A psychiatrist in the 1930s therefore concluded that the mental patient Wain must have gone through a development from ‘normal’ realistic cat drawing to increasingly ‘crazier’ abstract work. That idea caught on. “Because of his schizophrenia, the cat gradually disappeared from the design,” wrote, for example, The Poezenkrant in a cover article about Wain in 1987.
But it is a myth, the exhibition makers show that development from ‘healthy’ realism to ‘psychotic’ abstraction. Until his death in 1939, Wain also made sweet ‘realistic’ cat drawings and beautifully coloured, idyllic, dreamy landscapes in the institution. Especially with paint and crayons, because sharpeners and sharp pencils were taboo in the interior.