He would spend the rest of his life in successive psychiatric hospitals, from Bethlem to Napsbury, where he died aged nearly 80 in 1939.
In 1924 he was certified insane and admitted to the pauper ward of Springfield Hospital in Tooting. Sued for debt, he left for America to draw strip cartoons for Hearst Newspapers, but when his financial problems persisted on his return his habitual eccentricity began to veer into paranoia. Between 19, 1,100 Wain postcards were distributed by 75 publishers, none of whom seems to have paid royalties.īy 1907 he had become the victim of his own success with the market already flooded with Wain cats, there was little call for more. Naturally shy and retiring, he never tried to copyright his images, reproduced not just in books but on biscuit tins, china and, most prolifically, postcards. But despite putting in 14-hour days and pulling all-nighters, he was constitutionally incapable of making money. Since his father’s death in 1880 when he was just 20, Wain had been the main breadwinner of the family, with five sisters and a mother to support. Unfortunately things went wrong for the artist too. Wells emphatically agreed: ‘English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves,’ he would later declare. Nevertheless Wain prided himself on having, with Peter’s assistance, improved the cat’s social status, helping ‘to wipe out, once and for all, the contempt in which the cat has been held in this country’. Inevitably, things went comically wrong the humour is as basic as the saucy seaside postcard without the smut.
He created a sort of Bertie Wooster world with whiskers in which cats played a range of sports, enjoyed cultural activities - from lectures to ‘mewsical’ evenings - and followed fashionable fads from hydrotherapy to phrenology. With his transformation of the humble mouser into a feline version of the Edwardian at play, Wain had hit on a winning formula.
The Wain cat always had the same disconcerting look in its wide, glassy eyes: bombed out of its tiny mind Within days of publication its creator had lost his wife but was on his way to fame, though never fortune. Wain went to town, spending 11 days on a tour de force featuring 150 kittens with different expressions. In December 1886 a commission duly came from Sir William Ingram, owner of the Illustrated London News, for a double-page drawing of ‘A Kittens’ Christmas Party’. To amuse the invalid her loving husband took to drawing sketches of Peter in comical poses, which she encouraged him to show to his editors. In 1884 the 24-year-old Louis Wain had married his sisters’ governess, Emily Richardson, only for his new wife to fall ill with breast cancer. The original Wain cat was a black-and-white kitten called Peter belonging to a young late-Victorian magazine illustrator and his sick wife. But it always had the same disconcerting look in its wide, glassy eyes with the dilated pupils. The Wain cat came in a variety of breeds and colours: black and white, tabby, marmalade, white and blue (sky blue rather than Persian). Before Tom Kitten, before Felix the Cat, before Thomas ‘Tom’ Cat, Sylvester James Pussycat Sr, Top Cat and Fat Freddy’s Cat, there were the cats of Louis Wain.
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