Louis Wain

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. He sold his first drawing in 1881 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.

Early life

Drawing by Louis Wain titled 'Caught! Keep your mouth shut and let me open your mind for you'

Wain was born on 5 August 1860 in Clerkenwell in London. His father, William Matthew Wain (1825–1880), was a textile trader, living in London but originally from Leek, Staffordshire; his mother, Julie Felicie Boiteux (1833–1910), was a church embroiderer from a family of French origin. Wain's maternal grandfather, Louis Boiteux, was an artist. Wain was the first child and only boy in the family. He had five younger sisters: Caroline, Josephine, Marie, Claire and Felicie.

Wain was born with a cleft lip and as a child was not in good health; he did not attend school until he was ten. He was sent first to Orchard Street Foundation School in South Hackney but spent much of his time playing truant and wandering around London, attending lectures at the Royal Polytechnic Institution or going on insect-hunting expeditions into the countryside. From 1873 to 1876 he attended St Joseph's Academy in Kennington, a Catholic school (the Wain family was Catholic). He then did a course at the West London School of Art and was taken on as an assistant master at the school.

Artistic career

In December 1881, Wain's first drawing to be published appeared in the Christmas 1881 issue of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. It was a picture of bullfinches on laurel bushes, given the wrong title of "Robins Breakfast". The following year he was offered a position on the magazine and was able to give up his teaching position at the West London School of Art.

On 30 January 1884 Wain married Emily Marie Richardson, who had been the governess of his sisters, in St Mary's Chapel, Hampstead. The couple lived in Hampstead and were joined by Peter, a black-and-white kitten. Emily developed breast cancer soon after the marriage; Peter was a comfort to her and also, as Wain would later say, laid the foundation of his career as a cat artist. Encouraged by his wife, Wain sold his first published cat drawings to The Illustrated London News in 1884. At this time he was also reporting on agricultural shows and pet shows, and taking commissions for animal portraits. By 1886 his cat pictures had been more widely noticed and he was commissioned by Macmillan to illustrate a children's book, Mrs Tabby's Establishment. His fame became established with the publication in the 1886 Christmas edition of The Illustrated London News of his first drawing of anthropomorphised cats, A Kitten's Christmas Party, which shows 150 cats celebrating Christmas in eleven panels. Wain had little time to share his success with his wife; Emily died in January 1887 after just three years of marriage.

As a young widower, Wain rented rooms in New Cavendish Street in the City of Westminster and moved in somewhat Bohemian circles that included journalists and artists such as Herbert Railton, Caton Woodville, Linley Sambourne, Harry Furniss, Melton Prior, and Phil May. At musical evenings, he would improvise on the piano. He worked to build up his reputation by taking on commissions for a variety of subjects, including architectural and landscape drawings as well as animals, for a number of journals. By 1890 he was a household name, and, in acknowledgment of his expertise on cats, was elected president of the National Cat Club. Two illustrations of cats' Christmas parties in 1890 marked a new development in his style of drawing cats, as they took on more human features with Wain often doing preliminary sketches of people in public places.

Wain's father had died in 1880. His relationship with his mother and five sisters, none of whom married, had been strained as they had not approved of his marriage to Emily. But in 1890 there was a reconciliation and the family moved to the seaside resort of Westgate-on-Sea, Kent, where they rented a house belonging to Sir William Ingram, managing director of the Illustrated London News. Wain took up gardening and walking, as well as various sports including running, swimming, ice skating, boxing and fencing. Two of Wain's sisters, Claire and Felicie, were talented artists, but it was Wain who had to support the whole family and, although he was a popular and successful artist, money was always short. Bills were sometimes paid with pictures. Selling his pictures together with the copyright cheaply to publishers meant that he did not receive royalties when his work was reproduced and left him in straitened circumstances in later life.

Wain was a prolific artist, completing hundreds of pictures a year. His early work was mostly for periodicals but in the 1890s he turned his hand to illustrating children's books; over his lifetime there would be more than 100. He wrote many of the books he illustrated, and, as an acknowledged expert on cats, contributed the section on the domestic cat in Hutchinson's The Living Animals of the World (1901). In 1901, Wain produced the first Louis Wain Annual, which were published every year from 1901 to 1915 and in 1921. Between 1900 and 1940, 75 different publishers, including Raphael Tuck & Sons and Valentine & Sons, produced over 1100 of his images in postcard form. His work was also used in advertisements. Wain worked with a variety of media including watercolour, body colour, pen and ink, pencil, silverpoint, chalk and oil. In May 1930, he was moved again to Napsbury Hospital in Hertfordshire, where he continued to draw and paint. A successful exhibition of his work was held at the Brook Street Art Galleries in 1931, with proceeds going to his sisters. During this period Wain still drew cats, some of them stylised, but also drew landscapes in vivid colours. At Christmas he participated in decorating the wards, as he had done at Bethlem, and painted Christmas scenes on mirrors.

In November 1938, Wain suffered a stroke. His health further declined and he died on 4 July 1939; he was buried in St Mary's Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green. He was survived by two sisters, Claire and Felicie, his sister Josephine having died six months before him. A memorial exhibition was held in Brook Street Galleries in September 1939.

Legacy

During an August 1925 British Broadcasting Company broadcast, the writer H. G. Wells said of Wain in a statement read on his behalf by Robert Loraine in support of the appeal for Wain: "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." The same year Ramsay MacDonald wrote: "Louis Wain was on all our walls some 15 to 20 years ago. Probably no artist has given a greater number of young people pleasure than he has". 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 1972, the Victoria and Albert Museum devoted a major exhibition to Wain's work.