![]() ![]() It was only after Wain was ‘discovered’ in the Springfield paupers’ ward in 1925 that a national campaign raised the money to transfer him to the more salubrious Bethlem Royal Hospital, then in Lambeth, south London, and finally in 1930 to Napsbury, near St Albans.Įven before his breakdown, Wain’s delusions and obsessive theories – including the belief that cats’ fur generated electricity, and that, like magnets, the creatures habitually faced north – marked him as an eccentric. As a result, the family remained in near penury even as Louis Wain’s Annuals were becoming ubiquitous in family homes. Unfortunately, his father’s death in 1880 had left Wain the main breadwinner for his mother and five sisters – and he had neglected to copyright his images. Their popularity coincided with the expansion of the commercial print market and development of colour reproduction, and it is estimated that during this period Louis Wain regularly painted some 600 cat pictures a year (along with occasional dogs and birds). His anthropomorphic cats, often brightly coloured and usually engaged in fashionable contemporary activities – at the seaside, playing golf, going for a drive, taking tea – were widely circulated in annuals, illustrated newspapers, postcards and magazines. Wain was at his peak from the 1880s until the early 1900s. All photos: © Bethlem Museum of the Mind/Bridgeman Images Kaleidoscope Cats I–VIII (1920s/30s), Louis Wain. ![]() At the end of the film, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, they appear in a Hitchcockian dream sequence, melding and metamorphosing into one another, reflecting Cumberbatch’s own comment, in Chris Beetles’ new book on Louis Wain’s Cats (2021), that, with Wain’s story, ‘everything seems to blur in a kaleidoscopic mess of electricity, cats, love, loss of control and chaos’. They are now in the collection of the Bethlem Museum of the Mind and remain, for many, emblematic of ‘asylum art’. The eight drawings found by Maclay, popularly dubbed the ‘Kaleidoscope Cats’, were probably produced after Wain was institutionalised. Wain is played by Benedict Cumberbatch in a biopic released in January 2022 in the UK, which explores his scandalous marriage to his sisters’ governess, her early death from cancer, his subsequent rise to fame as a ‘cat artist’, and the overwhelming and increasingly violent delusions that ultimately led to his admission to the pauper ward of Springfield mental hospital, Tooting, in 1924. Maclay quickly recognised these drawings as the work of Louis Wain (1860–1939), a popular but financially unsuccessful commercial illustrator, who had died in July of the same year. The remaining five, densely patterned, symmetrical, and coloured with the luminosity of stained glass, are virtually abstract – except that they all coalesce around a pair of pointed ears, a grinning mouth, and two twinkling eyes. ![]() The third, more firmly outlined, is on the prowl, against a jagged, electrical force field that seems to emanate directly from its dark orange fur. A sepia tabby presents its profile against a background of softly coloured leaves another with long hair and saucer eyes is apparently suspicious of something just out of sight. I n 1939, the psychiatrist Walter Maclay found eight coloured drawings in a Notting Hill junk shop. ![]()
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