Louis Wain was an English artist
best known for his
drawings, which featured large-eyed cats and kittens.
He wrote, "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 doubly nature,
and these studies I think [to be] my best humorous work."
In his later years he suffered from schizophrenia. When his sisters could
no longer cope with his erratic and occasionally violent behaviour, he was
finally committed to a pauper ward of Springfield Mental Hospital in1924.
12 months later, he was discovered there, and his circumstances widely
publicized, which led to appeals from such people as H.G. Wells and even
the intervention of the Prime Minister. Wain was transferred to the
Bethlem Royal Hospital, and again in 1930 to Napsbury Hospital near St
Albans in Hertfordshire. This hospital had a garden with a colony of cats,
and he spent his final 15 years there in peace.
H.G. Wells said of him: "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."
All these books are available in the public domain but
none have been reprinted.
• Madame Tabby's Establishment (1886)
• Our Farm: The Trouble of Successes Thereof (1888)
• Dreams by French Firesides (1890)
• Peter, A Cat O'One Tail: His Life and Adventures (1892)
• Old Rabbit the Voodoo and Other Sorcerers (1893)
• The Dandy Lion (1900/01)
• Cats (1902)
• Pa cats, Ma Cats, and Their Kittens (1903)
• Louis Wain's Cat Painting Book (c.1910)
• Louis Wain's Cats and Dogs (c. 1910)
• The Louis Wain Nursery Book (c. 1910)
• Louis Wain's Cat Mascot (postcard colouring book, c.1910)
• Daddy Cat (1915)
• Little Red Riding Hood and Other Tales (1919)
Somebody's Pussies (1925)
