Louis Wain: The Edwardian artist who was 'perhaps the best PR cats have ever had'

Picture this: the players hold their cards close to their chests. With money on the table, there is everything to play for. The player on the far right frowns at his hand. Has he been handed a miserable lot, or is this a bluff — his scowl of disappointment a decoy that conceals an ace? The player behind him, unseen, looks over his shoulder, his expression one of alarm as he inspects his rival's cards. The player next to him is also sneaking a peep, of a different player's cards, his face inscrutable. Another at the table is frozen in a gasp, the cause of which is unclear. Money hangs in the balance. One player has his hand to his brow, furrowed in concentration.

Or, should I say, has his paw to his brow — because these players are cats.

A Round Game of Cards is just one of the wonderful imaginings of Louis Wain — a brilliant artistic mind of the 18th century, and perhaps the best PR cats have ever had other than Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld.

From August 9-23 the annual Louis Wain & the Cat Show is returning to the Chris Beetles Gallery, in celebration of the 165th anniversary of his birth. Think cats playing tennis, a cat working a long shift as a ticket inspector and even a cat reenactment of Act III, Scene I of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where Brutus attempts to appease the throng after Caesar's assassination with the immortal verse: ‘Meow meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow meow meow.’ (That’s cat for: ‘Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.’)

Featuring in the exhibition will be 24 previously unseen works by Wain, whose depictions of cats were so popular they made him a celebrity. ‘He was a household name in the same way Quentin Blake is now. Everybody knew him,’ says Chris Beetles, the gallery’s owner, who used to have four cats of his own (their deaths, he said, ‘broke his heart’). Chris has put on the Cat Show at his gallery every year since 1980 and has written Wain’s biography, Louis Wain’s Cats. ‘It causes excitement every year,’ he says of the exhibition, ‘and it has only got more and more popular ever since the film came out’. The film he is referring to is The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, which came out in 2021 and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the titular artist and Claire Foy as his wife, Emily Richardson-Wain.

And electrical Wain’s life certainly was. Born in Clerkenwell on August 5, 1860, to a textile trader and a church embroiderer, Wain was the eldest of six, the rest all girls. He had a cleft lip and was ill as a child, but eventually began attending school at the age of 10, though he often played truant.

The artist sold his first drawing in December 1881 (it appeared in the Christmas issue of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News) and gave up his position as an assistant master at the West London School of Art a year after to pursue illustrating full-time.

In 1884 he married Emily Richardson in Hampstead, causing controversy as she had been the governess of his sisters, and was 10 years his senior. They welcomed into their small family Peter, a black and white kitten, who became an inspiration for Wain and Richardson’s comfort in times of ill health. His career flourished and his cats turned from being naturalistic to anthropomorphised, going about the business of the average Edwardian lady or gentleman: some attended the opera, others wore monocles and smoked cigars.

His wife always encouraged his work and was fortunately able to see it flourish before her early death from breast cancer in 1887. Wain’s work appeared in books and magazines as well as on postcards and in adverts and the artist used the proceeds to support his mother and sisters, though always struggled for money due to copyright issues.

Sadly, he suffered a severe injury to his head in 1914 as a result of a freak accident involving a horse-drawn omnibus and was left in a coma. He was certified insane by his sisters 10 years later and admitted to Springfield Mental Hospital in Tooting. He suffered from a stroke in 1938 and died the following year, and was buried in Kensal Green — having spent the final 15 years of his life in various mental institutes, where he had continued to create art to support his family. Many of his later paintings have psychedelic qualities, later suggested by some to be indicators that he suffered from schizophrenia.

‘It’s a great story — his life and impact on Edwardian society — and it's also a sad story, due to his lapse into psychotic illness and incarceration.' Chris says. H. G. Wells once said of Wain: ‘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.’

For an artist of such celebrity, his works are still very affordable, with pieces available from the Chris Beetles Gallery from £1,750. This is for two reasons, says Leo Webster, a picture specialist at Bonhams, the auction house responsible for selling much of Wain’s work. ‘He was really prolific and naturally that does tend to slow or soften the market for artists as there’s no shortage of their work,’ Leo says. ‘With Wain, if you miss out on a piece, another one is probably going to come around in a month or so.’

‘Also, it’s only more recently that people have begun taking them more seriously, certainly from an auction perspective we’ve definitely seen an uptake in demand since the film,’ he added, saying Wain’s piece’s ‘whimsical’ quality may have lowered their value in the past.

‘There’s definitely more money in dog paintings than there is in cat pictures,’ Leo added, on the age-old rivalry that extends to the art market. ‘But that's definitely because there are far more dog pictures out there than there are of cats.’

One woman righting this frankly biased injustice, a brushstroke at a time, is Lesley Fotherby, who has a black cat named Pippin and is one of the artists who will be exhibited alongside Wain in The Cat Show.

‘There are so many different people there who look at cats in different ways’ she said of what she enjoys about the exhibition. It is Wain's individualism, she thinks, that sets him apart. ‘He paints cats like nobody else, so I suppose people like the quirkiness, the fact that he has a very interesting backstory and that his works are just very different.’

The joy of painting cats for Lesley is the way they move (she also paints dancers and horses for this very reason). ‘It's always a challenge to paint something that's not always going to be still in front of you,’ she says, hinting that she has fallen victim to the feline tendency to take one unawares, both with tooth and claw, during an otherwise innocent bellyrub.

So what is the creature's enduring appeal? And why do we, scratched, bloody and knowing no dog-like loyalty awaits us, continue to be pleased and delighted by the intricacies of the feline species?

‘Two reasons,’ my colleague, James Fisher, renowned in the office as the owner of a Maine Coon/Birman cross called Ted, says.

‘First, because they are at once adorably cute and ridiculous, yet somehow at the same time nature's most perfect killing machines. Second, because they do not award unconditional love. Sometimes they like you, sometimes they don't. In a world of constant and instant gratification, they are a reminder that the very good things in life need to be earned.’

‘Louis Wain & the Cat Show’ is available to view at the Chris Beetles Gallery from August 9-23