Louis Wain: The Man Who Loved Cats
The tragic life of the Edwardian illustrator who mainstreamed anthropomorphism
Louis Wain (1860–1939) was a well-known Edwardian period illustrator who rose to prominence in 1890–1900’s London and America. Nowadays, he is best remembered for his anthropomorphic cat drawings. His life and work later became a matter of great controversy among mental health theorists for years to come. These arguments should not be allowed to influence the enjoyment of his work unmolested by psychobabble.
Wain was a constant sketcher in his boyhood. Soon he became a talented illustrator of natural and agricultural landscapes —eventually, he would produce as many as 1,500 drawings/year, or as has been estimated altogether 150,000 drawings, book covers, comics, advertising, ceramics, and sketches — often as a function of making ends meet, which sadly they seldom did.
He led a fascinating but unfortunate life that was colored by continual personal tragedy and mental illness. Just which aspects of his life would be the focus of a coming film about him remains to be told. Last year, Amazon/Studio-Canal filmed “Louis Wain,” starring Benjamin Cumberbatch and Claire Foy, to be released in Europe and the US, in 2020.
Despite his fin de siècle popularity in Great Britain, Japan, and America, Wain is far less remembered in America than he is elsewhere. I perceive this as a cultural discrepancy with Americans, who wouldn’t have the same experience or nostalgia in their short collective historical conscious.
For that reason, a British production should provide a coherent and sensitive portrayal of Wain’s life and experiences. The question is will it draw a US movie audience who’ve never heard the name? The simple eponymous film title may not advance this cause. It may not be Disney sounding enough.
Cumberbatch, having played several Edwardian characters — Sherlock Holmes, for example — seems a natural for the part. As an Englishman, he would have ready familiarity with Wain’s life and work. Wain also contributed to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, serialized by The Strand.
In July of 2020, Cumberbatch told the Hollywood Reporter regarding his role
“I have admired Will’s (Sharpe, Director) work for several years through Flowers and from the moment we first met, knew he was the perfect person to bring Louis’ inspirational and Odyssean story to life. Together we plan to bring audiences a sincerely uplifting, playful, thought provoking tale of resilience, creativity and the enduring power of love.
From the sound of it, the recounting of Wain’s post-war years, will not be of primary focus or interest to audiences, as his later life is somewhat sad — not a big box-office draw. Besides, there’s scant anecdotal or factual information regarding his later career.
Earlier plays “Cat with Green Violin,” by Jane Cole, staged in 1991, and a second biopic, in 2003, Rod Keith’s “Fire in the Mind,” also took up Wain’s story, the coming film will be the first on the subject.
Early Life
Wain was the eldest with five younger sisters. All lived together with their French born mother their entire life, save for the youngest sister, who was institutionalized at thirty-years of age. The family moved around Clerkenwell several times. This pattern of settling and unsettling would permeate throughout his career. It could not have helped put the man at ease.
He had a proclivity to be an artist from an early age. As he told Roy Compton in The Idler,
“My mother tells me that in my childhood I had always a great appreciation for colouring and used to amuse myself for hours grouping shaded leaves. I used to wander in the countryside studying nature and I consider that boyish fancy did much towards my future artistic life, for it taught me my powers of observation and to concentrate my mind on the details of nature which I should otherwise never have noticed (Compton, 1895)
However, growing up he was often ill owing to a weak constitution, and was troubled by nightmares:
“I seemed to live hundreds of years, and to see thousands of mental pictures of extraordinary complexity … But above all, I was haunted; in the streets, at home, by day and night, by a vast globe, which seemed to have endless surface, and I seemed to see myself climbing over and over it, until, from sheer fright I came to myself, and the vision went.
At age ten or eleven, after a recovery from scarlet fever, the nightmares suddenly disappeared. Owing to a cleft lip, he was not allowed to attend school until he reached ten-years of age. Instead of facing the increasing anxiety of school life, and physical abuse from classmates, he frequently skipped school to instead roam around London at his leisure, sketching, taking in parks, lectures and museums, and what must have been an opulent and engrossing street-life experience. Wain would also spend his time at the London Docks, eaves-dropping on the colorful and fanciful sailor stories. He’d learn the ways and manners of diverse people in the city, which he would later caricature or satire in his work.
After his time roaming London, he attended the West London School of Art (1887–80) and then(unhappily) taught as assistant master there, before he struck out on his own as a freelancer. At twenty-years old, he made a success of his freelance work, but his father suddenly died, leaving him to fend for himself, and his family of six. He soon saved enough to rent his own space, where he could draw in peace. His work was soon noticed by the magazines in exhibits, and he was hired as a press-artist at Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, where he would spend four-years.
In his early illustrations, he rendered scenes of agricultural and livestock, estates — natural settings with birds and other animals, but no cats, as he thought no one would take him seriously.
Contemporary & Early Influences
Wain had contemporaries who would have inspired his early cat drawings, which he saw in Punch, and other British editions. Some of these were Phil May, Randolph Caldecott, and Harry Furniss.
Wain would before long draw most of his clothed cats walking upright. His stylishly appareled and frolicking cats were the taking off-point for the popular 1940–50’s Alfred Mainzer Cat postcards, as drawn by Eugen Hartung (1897–1973). Hartung utilized some of the same comic devices as Wain —coincidental hi-jinx, catastrophe, and wry humor.
Up through the Victorian period, cats had been vilified in England at least since the superstitious Middle Ages. On weekends, commoners idea of fun was rumming and hurling sacks of kittens into the river or fire or worse. (See Hogarth illustration, below.) In fact, they mistreated many animals similarly for entertainment.
Through his art and activism, Wain is credited for endearing the idea of cats as household pets into the hearts and imaginations of upper-class Edwardians who celebrated his work in the media, and all now wanted cats for themselves. The idea of animal abuse soon became no longer acceptable. At the first National Cat Club he presided over, in 1889, Wain said
“I have tried to wipe out, once and for all, the contempt in which the cat has been held in the country and raised its status from the questionable care and attention of the old maid to a real and permanent place in the home. I have myself found, as the result of many years’ inquiry and study, that all people who keep cats, and are in the habit of nursing them, do not suffer from those petty little ailments which all flesh is heir to. Viz. nervous complaints of a minor sort. Hysteria and rheumatism, too, are unknown, and all lovers of ‘Pussy’ are of the sweetest temperament (Hinchman)
Of more interest than his contemporaries were a handful of Victorian and earlier European artists who excelled depicting nature. One such early influence was Gottfried Mind, an autistic savant German painter, known as the “Raphael of Cats.”
Mind’s father was an art enthusiast, and allowed young Gottfried to study his collection of German seventeenth century paintings by Johann Elias Ridinger, whose work he honed his skills by means of emulation.
A contemporary of Ridinger, the painter and illustrator William Hogarth was an early satirist and animal rights advocate with strong opinions. Consider his brutally honest, disturbing and horrible “First Stage of Cruelty” (there were four stages)
Wain would have closely studied Hogarth. In fact, Wain would later be called the “Hogarth of Cat Life,” by the Punch editor. However, Wain’s themes were never as serious or even gut-wrenching, as were Hogarth’s, and he didn’t paint in oil, as did Mind, Hogarth and Ridinger.
Said Hogarth of the engraving
“(the images) were done in the hopes of preventing in some degree that cruel treatment of poor Animals which makes the streets of London more disagreeable to the human mind, than any thing what ever, the very describing of which gives pain.
French influences may have included A. Cheyère, for example, Les Chats Coiffés, and Les Chiens Coiffés (ca. 1825) lithographs. Note the supercilious and silly attitudes of some of the animals — a comment on French high society affectation. The costumes denoted title, status, or function.
Wain would also have been inspired by the Victorian artist John Tenniel, widely known for his many “Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There” anthropomorphic images:
Cats are People Too
His first cat drawing “A Kittens’ Christmas Party” (1883), and sold in 1886, was inspired by Peter, a black and white kitten he and his wife Emily took in as newlyweds. Wain first made sketches of Peter to please his ailing wife, who encouraged him to draw cats, she was his greatest source of inspiration. Peter was like a child to them.
Wain sketched the many moods of cats, as early as 1884, many demonstrated by Peter himself
Roy Compton quotes Wain in an interview as saying of Peter
“I trained Peter like a child, and he become my principle model and the pioneer of my success. I suggested an idea to Sir William Ingram, who had encouraged me greatly by taking some of my sketches, which showed promise but were not sufficiently good to reproduce. I worked upon the cat pictures until they finally caught his fancy (Hitchman).
It is clear Wain had an early imperative or exigency to draw cats.
Emily, Richardson, a Wain household governess, was thirty-three — ten years his senior when they married— that disparity considered scandalous, at the time, Wain’s sisters were against the marriage, and neither family attended the ceremony. Shortly thereafter, Louis and Emily then took up a new residence together (Hitchman). Not before long, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, that would soon take her at thirty-six years of age, a blow from which Louis seemingly never seemed to recover, instilling in him a long-term melancholy that increasingly colored grey his nature and disposition going forward into an unhappy, mercurial, and irascible man.
In 1886, Sir Walter Ingram, Wain’s publisher at The Illustrated London News, noted his drawing with one-hundred-fifty cats (below), and published it with a collection of Christmas cat drawings in what would be come an annual Christmas publication. It was a sensation. With the newfound publicity he began to pursue his cats passionately, and his work began to be widely circulated and recognized.
Subsequently, Wain would be published in several English magazines, including the English Illustrated Magazine, Windsor Magazine, Cassell’s, The Boy’s Own Paper and The Strand.
Wain continued to cultivate what would become one of his signatures — cats doing people things. Singing, grinning, scoffing, dining, sporting, dancing, drinking, both jovial and bittersweet satire, “at once embodying all that was fun and stylish in Edwardian times” (Beetles).
The cats’ charades betray some of the best and worst of Edwardian society in playfully mocking gestures that stylistically were emblematic of the press-art of the period. Wain’s satire, unlike Hogarth, was more lighthearted and less cathartic, as was his message.
Looking back on this period, giving insight into his methodology — sketching people in public as cats, Wain recalled
“There is another way of sketching cats, and this way I often resort to. I take a sketch-book to a restaurant or other public place, and draw the people in their different positions as cats, getting as near to their human characteristics as possible. This gives me double nature, and these studies I think my best humorous work (Hitchman)
According to Atlas Obscura’s “Before Cat Memes, There Were Louis Wain’s Controversial Cat Illustrations” (Wright, 2016)
“Wain’s cat drawings began as sober, realistic affairs but his specialty became creatures that walk on hind legs, grin with wide mouths, wear clothes, celebrate Christmas, play golf and drink cocktails. They’re cute, but also sort of sinister; they glare and wink, their tongues loll, they get up to mischief” (Source)
At 30 years old, Wain was established as one of both England and America’s most well-known illustrators.
“As an illustrator, Wain was hugely prolific. A regular contributor to British magazines and newspapers, his images populated many of the era’s most loved children’s books and postcards. During the 1900’s Wain was producing on average six-hundred new designs every year and his annual output of cats could reach up to one-and-a-half thousand. In his lifetime he illustrated more than two-hundred books and had sixteen hugely successful Christmas annuals (source)
Wain was also known as an early animal rights advocate. In 1887, he founded and served as president of the National Cat Club, and began to support several charities, of note, the Anti-vivisection Society, Society for the Protection of Cats, and the Dumb Animal League. Britain, having drafted in 1822 the ‘Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle,’ was the first country to pass an animal welfare act. It wasn’t until 1899, that the Anti-vivisection Society received Mark Twain’s letter to the society making a new philosophical argument.
“I believe I am not interested to know whether Vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn’t. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. The pains which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity towards it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further (Twain, Mark)
“Consenting animals” was a typical Twain rhetorical proposition
Said H. G. Wells of Wain, in 1925, “He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world.” This cat world was a fanciful one of Wain’s design that didn’t intend to portray cats as they behaved in real life, but playful and mockingly satirical of humans, in fantastical ways that charmed his reading audience.
Other Early Works
Wain’s postcards and illustrations were reproduced in the millions, eventually lining the walls and filling the bookshelves of most every little boy and girl’s nursery, until WW II. However, by 1907, he had saturated his own market with little wealth to show for it, and by 1914, he would struggle to survive in a paper-shortage driven market. One of his chronic mistakes was to neglect copyrighting or securing the rights to his work.
In 1907, an impecunious Wain traveled to New York city, to work for, among others, Hearst Magazine, where he created popular comic strips with various names, such as, Cats About Town, Grimalkin, Adventures of Billy Kitten, Adventures of Toby Maltese, Adventures of Tom Scratch, Tom Catt, and The Velvetpaw Family.
These comics strips were a natural progression of his busy press-art and narratives Wain had instituted, since 1890. His cartoon images were a stylistic forerunner of early moving picture funny-reels.
However, in New York, he was outcast as a harsh critic of the city, and pilloried in the press, inducing and causing him to return penniless to England. On his sail home, his mother passed away, adding salt to his wounds.
In 1890, tennis — or real or royal tennis, as it was called — had lost most of its popularity when the first ever Wimbledon Championship was held. The tournament reinvigorated interest in the sport, and so tennis playing cats were a frequent sporting motif for Wain and his cats
Futuristic Cat Ceramic Figurines (1910–1914)
Back in England, Wain tried once more to cash in on his growing popularity in America, embarking on a brilliant series of cat ceramic figures, inspired by the Cubist or Futurist Movements. In fact, the series was unpopular in the UK, thus he sought his fortune in the states. Tragically, a large shipment of the statues on a ship bound for America was sunk by a German U-Boat. The production of the ceramics was taken up thereafter by a Czechoslovakian company, some of which were signed, some not. There are many forgeries on the market.
Wain’s Futuristic ceramics functioned as various office fixtures: card holders, ash trays, pencil caddies, ink wells, vases, and perhaps salt and pepper shakers. Although he made numerous impressions, only nine designs were ever registered. They were first produced by Max Emmanuel & Co.
WWI Period
During the war, Wain’s chronic financial struggles continued. He lost money backing an American invention (‘everlasting’ oil-less lamps), gave away his work too inexpensively, failed to secure rights to reproductions of his work, and handed out loans indiscriminately. However, he continued to ply his trade making volumes of post cards, book covers, and advertising copy.
After the war, Wain’s emotional stress and anxiety became increasingly worse, and he cumbersome to himself and others. Sadly, in 1924, his sisters committed him to an asylum. He likely suspected a conspiracy by them to profit themselves, however, even there he continued to draw, paint, and develop new styles.
A centennial retrospective was held in 1960 to honor him. His works are to this day greatly sought after by collectors. Over the years, Wain works have become rare to acquire, especially the ceramics. Given a surge in popularity some years ago, counterfeit figures began appearing, and many items pulled from auctions. The absence of dates on much of his unpublished work makes chronological ordering highly speculative and lacking in consensus.
Of the scale of his popularity, P.M. Ramsay MacDonald, in 1925 made clear the mainstreaming of Wain’s art into popular culture.
“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.
Late Works, Miscellaneous Drawings and Prints
From “Cute to Crazy”
During and after the war, Wain kept producing, though his chronic financial struggles continued, as did his mental condition and character. He changed from a mild mannered, and gentle man, to an explosive, hostile and sometimes violent one. He’d aimlessly wander the city streets — as he did as a boy — or spend hours writing incoherently. During the war years, having fell out of fashion and into debt, he was forced to pay his bills with his artwork at fire-sale prices.
In 1924, penniless, miserable, and unstable, his sisters could no longer handle him in their house, had him committed to a pauper ward at Springfield Mental Hospital, in Tooting, diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia.’ His sisters were frequent visitors to Springfield, bringing him crayons, pencils, and paper. They dutifully collected all of his sketches during each visit, and perhaps sold them off.
In 1925, upon belatedly hearing of Wain’s ignoble treatment and state of squalor, H. G. Wells and the Prime Minister outraged publicly and insisted he be treated more honorably. He was then moved to Bethlehem Hospital — then known as Bedlam, the world’s first ‘mental hospital,’ dating back to the fourteenth century.
Bedlam had a history that was captured by William Hogarth, in his A Rakes Progress (1735) series of eight drawings (see above). In the 18th century, medical opinion routinely conflated mental illness with moral weakness, which caused the criminally insane to share the same facility as those who merely suffered mental illness. Bedlam was open to the public on certain days — for the price of a penny, visitors could visit and tour the hospital for their entertainment, just as they might attend a circus ‘freak-show.’
In 1929, Bethlem moved to Southwark, where it is thought that Wain’s more striking, fragmented and mosaic cats first began to appear. When the hospital moved again, in 1930, to South London, it was decided he be moved to Napsbury Hospital, in St. Albans, away from the unnerving city, where he would enjoy the landscape and find more peace.
Once in Napsbury, He soon began drawing in an increasingly abstract style. None of his work from these last nine-years (1930–39) was dated. For that reason, some dates are gross estimations.
In the 1940’s, speculating psychiatrists suggested that these late illustrations were a reflection of Wain’s deteriorating mental condition, or schizophrenia — back then, a catchword for any mental illness — and that the sequence of these same eight-renderings could be used as a means of peering into Wain’s psyche over a time. Thought the idea still persists, contemporary psychiatrists are more inclined to suspect he suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome.
This theory, was promulgated by Walter Maclay, an early outside art collector and psychologist, who in 1939 happened upon Wain’s work, unceremoniously discarded in a Notting Hill junk shop.
“Maclay was a psychiatrist in London with a penchant for art created by patients diagnosed with mental illness. (He also liked to experiment with mescaline, and invited volunteers from the Surrealist art movement to dose-up and draw.) Together with his colleague Dr. Eric Guttmann, he assembled the Guttman-Maclay Collection of Psychiatric Art, in Bethlem, where Wain was a patient for several years.) Maclay believed that art was a window into the patient’s mind; he had Wain’s paintings framed and presented them as the illustrated decline of an artist — from cute to crazy” (Wright)
Maclay saw similarities in Wain’s work and psychedelic images induced by hallucinogenic drugs. He cobbled together his “Famous Eight,” — as they are known (above), to represent a transgression into schizophrenia. He drew attention to the increasingly wild looking cat eyes, and abstracted images, as a strong indicator of a mental state.
Chris Beetles challenges Maclay’s work, in his Louis Wain’s Cats (2011)
“There is no question Wain suffered from schizophrenia, but most of the literature surrounding how his disorder progressed is unfounded or just plain wrong.” (source)
An idea was put forth that Wain inevitably contracted toxoplasmosis from proximity to cat faeces, which scientists Fuller Torrey and Robert H. Yolken connected with schizophrenia. But that hypothetical premise precludes any genetic causation factor. However, there is no known valid research that the parasite could be the sole cause of schizophrenia, or that it even contributes to it. That Torrey was for involuntary confinement of schizophrenics doesn’t exactly boost his credibility.
According to O’Flynn (see video, below), Maclay found the eight sketches together in the junk shop, i.e., not cobbled together from a larger collection merely to suit his theories. However, Maclay may have bought more than eight drawings. Nonetheless, there are plenty of such striking examples in circulation of pastel-neon cats, in Day-glo and fairly land settings — like Maclay’s, all undated, as those below.
It’s clear that the mental health research community interest in Wain’s late works renewed in the 1960’s, with the surge of psychedelic drug use and studies of its affects. Maclay’s theories were still being taught. Maclay’s theory has more recently been challenged by psychologists, such as William Fitzgerald (2001), Aidan McGennis, and writer Rodney Dale (1968). Vaughan Bell quotes Dale’s comment
“Wain experimented with patterns and cats, and even quite late in life was still producing conventional cat pictures, perhaps 10 years after his [supposedly] ‘later’ productions which are patterns rather than cats (Bell 2007)
Dale was credited with creating renewed interest in Wain, with his 1968 biography Louis Wain — The Man Who Drew Cats. He passed away, in 2020. Fitzgerald seems to concur with both O’Flynn, and Fitzgerald, who wrote
“While Wain’s art took on a more abstract nature as he grew older, his technique and skill as a painter did not diminish, as one would expect from a person with schizophrenia [Source]
In 1999, Aidan McGennis noted a variant theory
Moreover, elements of visual agnosia (the inability to recognize certain objects, even though a person can recall them if asked) are demonstrated in his painting. If Wain had visual agnosia, it might have manifested itself merely as extreme attention to detail
Late Theories
Among the more interesting discussions of Wain, psychosis and art, are the ideas taken up by van Eeckelen, in his How Mad is that Cat? Psychotic Patterns Starring In: The Louis Wain Kitten Book (2012).
Of particular interest are Wain’s narratives— which he rarely wrote — that accompany his Kitten Book drawings
Van Eeckelen’s analysis of Wain shed new light on the subject using the mimetic theories of René Girard.
Already in 1890 Louis Wain formulated the idea that cats would promote mental health. We can see however that earlier than at the time of his internment psychotic patterns are recognizable in his stories and drawings of cats. How should we understand this? The cats’ world is in fact the human world. It consists of projections of mimetic rivalry on an imaginary alternative world. In this way, those projections — like the delusions of electrical ‘radiation’ — provide a meaning to the disruptive experiences that Louis Wain underwent. To some extent they create a distance towards the concrete interpersonal context in which such disruptive experiences actually occur.
The flight into the cats’ world creates a liberating lowering of consciousness with regard to concrete, interpersonal problems. (One can thereby feel reminded to Nietzsche who suggested that we should enjoy the surface of things in an artistic way, precisely because any depth is equivalent to the real negativity behind it.) This strategy of madness, of fantasy as a kind of redemption from madness itself, is the double of the exorcism of madness that exists within normality. Also in the realm of normality there are in fact constantly double binds and mimetic positioning behaviors, though they are much less intense and less frenetic.
We can think of the competition between peers in many areas of society. As a result people who are very ‘close’ to each other are both colleagues and ‘enemies’ within contexts in which the implicit hierarchies constantly vary. The translation of mimetism into the language of a so-called healthy person, however, into the language of accepted morality and behavior, a rationalization that goes along with the projection of mimetic symptoms on a supposedly ‘incomprehensible’ madness, such a translation also obscures the underlying mimetism of ‘normality’, of what is only ‘not yet mad enough’ to be perceived as such… (Van Eeckelen 2012)
A lecture by David O’Flynn, in the 2012 video, below, sheds an interesting perspective, that the chronology and disposition of Wain’s later works was intrinsically connected with Maclay’s interpretations, merely serving to validate his own theories. O’Flynn seemed skeptical of Maclay’s theories and sought to refute them.
Wain made traditional and abstract work at the same time, a fact that muddles Maclay’s theory of linear digression. Even had the dates of the sketches been known, a correlation isn’t so clear. Van Eeckelen, makes the case that mental illness could be detected as early as 1903, in his analysis of the ‘Louis Wain Kitten Book.’ O’Flynn and others argue Wain’s work consistently ameliorated, not deteriorated, and became more interesting.
More theories of Wain’s ‘psychedelic’ treatments include memories of vibrant patterns his mother and father created as a textile designers, and the kaleidoscope, which was an Edwardian distraction. Wain’s sisters concurred their brother’s madness was the result of a bump on the head he received in 1914 falling off an omnibus, knocking him unconscious. His first words when he came to: “is the cat alright?” as rumor was the omnibus swerved to avoid a cat, causing it to lurch. No one else saw a cat.
The connection between art and psychosis is still debated at great length in the research and mental health communities. It’s still an inexacting business, as it was in the 1930’s, with several opposing camps and lack of consensus on theory. Similar arguments are posited to several artists, notably van Gogh, Pollack, de Kooning, Rothko, and many others. These vary from erudite to tedious.
In other words, we don’t really need — or even desire — to know the private ruminations of the artist. Such a focus misses the point of art on its own terms and merits, throws water on the parade. Wain would never have dreamed his art would have been deconstructed in this way, and there was no precedent for it. Would he have benefited from mid-20th century theories of art and schizophrenia? Probably not.
Wain was laid to rest at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green, London Borough of Brent, Greater London. It must be said his plot is in a poor state of repair, although flowers are regularly lain there. The first Wain biography (Dale) wasn’t published until 1968 — thirty-years after Wain’s death. It was Dale’s first publication. Recent renewed interest has inspired exhibits in the United Kingdom. It is hoped the forthcoming movie will inspire more interest
“A mouse in the paws is worth two in the pantry — Louis Wain
For more information on the relationship of mental illness and outsider art, visit Bethlem’s Museum of the Mind.
References
“Louis Wain & His Cats”. World Collectors Net Archived from the original on 18 May 2014. Retrieved 29 June 2013
Fitzgerald, Michael (September 2002). “Louis Wain and Asperger’s Syndrome”.Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine. 19 (3): 101. doi:10.1017/S0790966700007217
McGennis, Aidan (March 1999). “Louis Wain: his life, his art and his mental illness” Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine. 16 (1): 27. doi:10.1017/S0790966700005000
“Before Cat Memes, There Were Louis Wain’s Controversial Cat Illustrations, “ Andy Wright, February, 2016
“Cat Compendium: The Words of Louis Wain,” (Hanning, Peter) Owen Peter Limited (2016)
“Cute Cats and Psychedelia: The Tragic Life of Louis Wain,” Illustrated Chronicals, retrieved May 2020
“Louis Wain: his life, his art and his mental illness,” McGennis, Aidan, Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, (3/1999)
“The Colorful, Dancing, Psychedelic Cats of Louis Wain,” Bucknell, Alice (Mar. 2018) retrieved from artsy.net (5/2020)
How Mad is that Cat? Psychotic Patterns Starring In: The Louis Wain Kitten Book,” 2012 (Van Eeckelen, Keith)
“The false progression of Louis Wain” Bell, Vaughan (2007), Mind Hacks Retrieved 25 June 2017.
Gallery talk: Kaleidoscope Cats: A Clinical Perspective on Louis Wain (Initial title) OR Two Men and Eight Cats: Louis Wain, Walter Maclay and the Kaleidoscope Cats (video), O’Flynn, David, 2012, (Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum)
Lost in Catland: The Life of Louis Wain, Hitchman, Simon (2010) retrieved from https://simon-hitchman.com/2020/04/21/lost-in-catland-the-life-of-louis-wain/ (5/2020)
“The Archetypal Louis Wain Cat,” Compton, Roy, The Idler (Jan. 1886)
“The Colorful, Dancing, Psychedelic Cats of Louis Wain,” Bucknell, Alice (2018) retrieved from https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-colorful-dancing-psychedelic-cats-louis-wain (5/2020)
Recommended Reading
Louis Wain — The Man Who Drew Cats, Dale, Rodney, 1968 (William Kimber), repub, 1991, (Chris Beetles & Michael O’Mara), and 2000
“The false progression of Louis Wain,” Bell, Vaughn, 2007 (Mindhacks.com, retrieved 5/2020)
“Louis Wain’s Cats,” Beetles, Chris, Worth Press (2011)
