After causing a minor scandal the same year by marrying his sisters’ governess, Emily Richardson, the couple set up home in Belsize Park. Having studied at the West London School of Art, he set out on a career as a nature illustrator, publishing his first drawing, BULLFINCHES ON THE LAURELS, in 1881. Socially isolated, he was forced to face up to his responsibilities at 20, on the death of his father. A naturally gifted artist, he was eccentric even as a youth, claiming to have harnessed electricity from the ether which meant he was regularly pursued down the street by a giant ball of energy.
The oldest of six children and the only boy, his sensitive disposition and hare lip meant that doctors gave orders that he shouldn’t attend school until the age of ten. The son of a working-class English textile trader and French mother born in Clerkenwell in the summer of 1860, Wain suffered from nightmares – which he later described as “visions of extraordinary complexity” – from an early age. It’s just a shame more people don’t know about him.” There are lots of great stories about him walking along the beach with his cats following behind him. He loved cats, he loved people, and he loved children. “As well as being a technically brilliant artist, he was a man of almost boundless generosity. “For me, Wain was pretty much a saint,” says Tibet. British cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.” Yet despite Wain’s undisputed genius, his name has slipped almost completely from the public memory.Ĭursed, seemingly, by an endless stream of bad luck, personal misfortune and deteriorating mental health, his death a month before his 80th birthday in July 1939 came after decades of psychiatric problems which had seen him all but forgotten. “He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. Others drink tea, play croquet, go to the opera, and, in some of his most striking pictures, even go to war. In Wain’s weird and wonderful world, tabby cats in top hats chomp on cigars and electric blue felines play violins. By portraying cats as lovable bright and human, Wain helped change the way society looked at them.” “They saw cats, at best, as mouse catchers. A connoisseur of outsider art, and an artist in his own right with seminal paramusical project Current 93, his fascination with Wain began as a 12-year-old growing up in Malaysia. “The Victorians didn’t really even like cats,” explains David Tibet at his home in Hastings. One of the most successful and prolific artists of the Edwardian era, illustrating more than 200 books and 16 editions of LOUIS WAIN’S ANNUALS, as well as creator of cinema’s first animated feline, PUSSYFOOT, in 1917, Wain’s anthropomorphic cats did more than just delight generations of children. Because all of them owe a debt of cat-itude to Louis Wain. Where the antics of Grumpy Cat are met with a shrug rather than rapt adoration. Where commuters aren’t consoled by the lasagne-guzzling antics of Garfield or young girls by the trials of Hello Kitty. Imagine a world without Felix, Sylvester or Top Cat. Taken from the document curated by Nick Cave, featured in the A/W18 ‘Romance and Ritual’ issue of Another Man:
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