Louis Wain

In reference to For Louis Wain.

Louis Wain (1860–1939) was an artist who specialised in drawing and painting anthropomorphised cats.



Despite having no special interest in cats before his success, Wain came to be a leading authority on them: he was elected president of the National Cat Club and judged many cat shows. 



Wain’s work is most famous for being a documentation of somebody suffering from the onset of what is believed to be schizophrenia. He spent the final fifteen years of his life in hospitals with declining mental health, where he continued to draw and paint. His cats became increasingly abstract as his condition deteriorated. 



I first discovered Wain’s work in my early 20s. Like a lot of people, I was guilty of mythologising him, a bit like Van Gogh or Brian Wilson, viewing the abstraction of his later work as if he’d found some ultimate truth and lost his mind in the process. In reality, his condition was most likely brought on after suffering a head injury.



As undoubtably sad as his life became, I much prefer his later ‘kaleidoscopic’ paintings and still believe he had found some sort of truth or honesty within his work.