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During the late-19th and early 20th centuries, few artists enjoyed the kind of widespread popularity that Louis Wain did. He was a household name and his works could be found everywhere. His speciality \u2013 anthropomorphic cats and kittens with oversized eyes doing human activities from singing songs to playing sports \u2013 adorned postcards, calendars, annuals and biscuit tins.<\/p>\n
Rare was the household that didn\u2019t possess at least one example of Wain\u2019s work, and many people were not content unless they had a collection of his feline-based art, including such eminent figures as the novelist HG Wells and the prime minister Stanley Baldwin<\/a>. Both were great champions of Wain, in particular when the artist was discovered to have been committed to a pauper\u2019s asylum in his later years.<\/p>\n That Wain\u2019s life didn\u2019t trace the kind of trajectory to be expected given the heights of his popularity makes him a fascinating character to study. He is the subject of the film, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain<\/em>, which offers a portrait of the artist as a brilliant but tortured soul.<\/p>\n The film\u2019s lead, Benedict Cumberbatch, found multiple layers to Wain\u2019s personality, writing in his foreword to a new edition of the Chris Beetles book Louis Wain\u2019s Cats<\/em> that \u201cto be Louis felt like tuning in to a perpetual voice, sometimes quiet and shy, sometimes channelled into a singular focus, and at other times openly confrontational, a voice saying to the world, \u2018But don\u2019t you see?!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Louis Wain was born in Clerkenwell in central London in 1860, the first of six children of a textile merchant and his French wife. Home life for the Wains was a little unorthodox for the times. Not only did none of his five sisters ever marry, but each of them lived in the family home for their entire lives.<\/p>\n Wain himself had been born with a cleft lip and was a sickly boy who experienced frequent nightmares \u2013 which he later called \u201cvisions of extraordinary complexity\u201d \u2013 and contracted serious illnesses, such as scarlet fever. On doctor\u2019s orders, the young Louis didn\u2019t enter conventional education until the age of 10, and when he eventually did he often skipped school, electing instead to wander the streets of London in the safe solitude of his own company.<\/p>\nSafe in solitude<\/h3>\n